Category: Contemporary Women Writers
My Grandmother Was an Elf!
Have you ever wanted to know an elf? I’ve known them, all my life. I hail from an Irish family, which is why the gift of gab comes so easily, and why I’ve always been enchanted by elves. Maybe that’s why we named our production company Elfenworks. Hello! You don’t know me, because my work […]
Believe in Happy Ever After: Author Branding is More Than Genre
Believe in Happy Ever After: Author Branding is More Than Genre Believe in Happy Ever After. This is the tag line that appears in the header of my author website and a lot of people ask me why. It took quite some time to come up with an appropriate tag line, a sentence or phrase, […]
My Road To Publication
My debut novel, a psychological thriller called Keep You Safe is published on 17th August. It follows the story of Natalie, who is convicted of a crime she can’t remember committing and separated from her baby son, Harry, for over three years. Her husband has divorced her and taken their son to live on the […]
From Facebook Posts and Grocery Lists to Book
What does a Facebook-posting, grocery-list-writing mom of seven do when a story pops into her head—for the first time in her life? She writes it down. And when the next story pops into her head, she writes that one down, too. The next thing she knows, she’s on a journey to publishing her first book. […]
Retirement and Writing
The thought of retirement is an anxious and exciting proposition. The end of a career can leave us wondering who we are and who we will become without our job description. Visions of unscheduled and endless expanses of time offer contradictory images of boredom and fulfillment. What will we do to fill the hours that […]
The Unexpected Writing Prompt that Began My Career
I never wanted to be a writer much less an author. Two negative experiences in the classroom convinced me I did not have that talent. In high school, an English teacher I greatly admired reviewed a poem I’d written about the death of my beloved dog. She told me the poem was “maudlin,” a term […]
How Writing Changed My Life
Wings of a Flying Tiger is a heroic tale in which ordinary Chinese risked their lives to rescue and safeguard a downed American pilot in WWII in China. It is a work of fiction. But to me, a Chinese-American, it is also personal. My mother and grandma had lived in Nanking and escaped from the […]
THE ONE-EYED QUEEN: Inspo and Sanity
What inspires me to write is that I’ll go insane if I don’t. It’s very motivating. My first recollection of using it as a coping mechanism, I’m not sure how old I was. Four, maybe five, unable to sleep because I was certain there was a tangle of snakes under my bed. I crept to […]
On Writing: Ausma Zehanat Khan
Crime fiction has no shortage of gutsy, brilliant and intriguingly flawed heroines, so when I set about writing my own mystery series, I knew I wanted one of my detectives to embody those same qualities. Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty are partners who work at Community Policing, a unit that investigates crimes that impact minority […]
Writing Process, Routine, and Craft
Writing is craft as much as it is art. Without the strong support of a good practice, it is very hard to create good work – at least, this is what I have found with my writing. Without a strong routine, my work is haphazard and frustrating and I fall into all the bad habits, […]
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