Category: Contemporary Women Writers
From Novel to Memoir
I have always wanted to write novels. My very first novel was published by a company who specialised in short novels written for the older end of the reading market ie love but no sex, and were available only through libraries. I was delighted. My career had taken off. Not so, as we writers know. […]
Top 5 Things Pole Fitness Taught Me About Writing
Top 5 Things Pole Fitness Taught Me About Writing Several years ago, I realized an important truth about myself: if exercise is not something fun and interesting, I am never, ever going to do it. However, my tendonitis becomes harder to manage when I gain weight. I also harbor a deep, abiding love for junk […]
How Reviews Helped Strengthen My Future Novels
By Jennifer S. Alderson “What are your novels about?” I imagine this is the question writers are asked most often. I write mysteries and thrillers so until recently my standard reply was a quick description of the puzzle that must be solved and the quest my series’ main character must undergo to save those she […]
The Peripatetic Muse: Writing in Multiple Genres
My latest book is just aborning this spring, To the Bones, a satirical genre-fluid novel that draws on Appalachian tales, horror, and romance in its story of three interlocked mysteries in one small mountain town. It follows a poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse (Press 53, 2018) and precedes a work-in-progress, a haibun […]
10 Things Writing About a 1970s Commune Taught Me about World-Building
“Write what you know.” Every writer has heard this advice more times than we can count. My debut novel This I Know is steeped in my upbringing as a preacher’s daughter in the 1960s Midwest. I understood my characters because they were in my DNA. I was familiar with the rural West Michigan setting because […]
Gifts For The Writer
I met Elizabeth Peavey at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast summer workshop several years ago. As the playwright of “My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother,” she gave her audience something to laugh about. She is a funny lady. As a workshop leader, she made her group of aspiring writers smile and laugh; if […]
The Emotional Portfolio
The Emotional Portfolio Many of us are familiar with the term “Emotional Baggage” a label often used in a negative context to describe how some people allow the past to cloud their present and future. However, as a writer, I prefer to call this collection of emotions and experiences the “Emotional Portfolio.” A portfolio is […]
Take Me Seriously??
A friend suggested recently I write an essay about how one went about being taken seriously as a female writer over fifty. My first reaction to this suggestion was actually surprise, and my second was wonder …. maybe she didn’t take me seriously? I sat back in my chair and regarded her more closely. No, […]
Writing Through Despair
One night, around the midpoint of writing my novel, I hit rock bottom. I’d wrestled all day with a plot problem I couldn’t solve. There had been no days off for months, my back was agony, my eyesight was blurred. Some awful compulsion was forcing me to continue doing the one thing I had proved […]
What helped and Hindered My Writing
What has helped and hindered my writing? I spent a few weeks thinking about this and watching myself to see what items applied to me and what reasons I was using as an excuse not to write. The main reasons that I found myself using this last year has been my health. I suffered from […]
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