Category: Contemporary Women Writers
My Life in Bookstores
What came first — my love of books or my love of bookstores? The two are inseparable in my mind. All I know is that bookstores are as much part of my life as any relationship with friends. And like the best of friendships, it continues to deepen and evolve with age. My most recent […]
Multilingualism and Writing
When I was eleven years old, my parents decided to up and move to another country. Quebec was not the original destination they had in mind; in fact, I didn’t know such a place even existed until my parents told me we were moving there. After that, I dug through a stack of old life […]
What a Week of Pro Tennis Taught Me About Writing
My son and I are tennis nuts. We spend days on end at the U.S. Open in New York each summer, and we travel to other major tournaments, both home and abroad, as often as we can. When a snowstorm back east a few months ago left us stranded in California – where we’d gone […]
Writing Under Multiple Pen Names
When a dream comes true, and it’s even better than your original dream, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve reached a pinnacle in your writing journey and you’re pinching yourself to wake up. You’re floating on air. It’s all too wonderful to be true. But there it is in black and white – you’ve […]
Of Fathers and Daughters: The Thriller as Tragic Love Story
I adored my father when I was growing up. I was a natural tomboy, my father’s shadow. I was the middle of three girls, and my father called me “Sam”—short for “Samuel,” and not “Samantha”—and I was more than happy to become his only “son.” My father taught me how to hammer a nail and […]
Past, Present, Never: Writing Time In Fiction
New authors are always advised to avoid complexity, to begin with a single narrator and a straightforward plot. I ignored that advice. In my first novel, there was a story in the present which related to events in the past, told in flashbacks. In my second I had three interconnected narratives. I think perhaps I […]
Faith-Based What?
I’m often asked about my choice of writing genres. Strike that. People express shock, dismay, and a great deal of puzzlement upon learning of my passion to write what I characterize as faith-based thrillers. My journey as a writer followed a crooked path with lots of disappointments that led to the ultimate creation of the […]
What’s Food Doing in Your Fiction?
I’m mildly obsessed with writing about food, both in memoir and in mystery, so I paid attention when a blogger recently complained about the preponderance of food scenes in fiction, warning authors to give those scenes tension and to make them advance the plot. It’s not bad advice, although I think it more important that authors […]
WE’RE SISTERS, and that explains everything…
Your sister can be the first person you call with news whether it’s good or bad or…she can be the last. Of course, there are always sisters who fall somewhere in between. But wherever you and your sister end up on the scale of the sister bond, the reasons are often complex and multi-layered. After […]
The Art of Co-Authorship
When we launched our website SomethingRhymed.com, we set ourselves a yearlong goal to research and write about a different pair of female writer friends every month. Well-wishers cautioned that we might struggle to find a dozen such duos, and this was something that worried us too. We knew all about Wordsworth and, Byron and Shelley, […]
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