Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Writing the Novel that Sells
As an author, it’s the question that keeps you awake at night. Is there a magic formula? Is there a fool-proof way to know your novel has the chops to catch an editor’s attention? Yes. I believe there is. In the next few minutes, I’m going to lay out the information that you need. With […]
Getting Your Book Into A Bookshop
I speak as a bookshop owner. Someone who loves books. Most of us that run bookshops do, so please bear in mind that if you want us to stock your book we theoretically, will lend a receptive ear. But here are a few tips to help make the whole submission process a bit easier. Running […]
Walk a Mile In Your Characters’ Shoes
“Write what you know.” Apparently, it was Mark Twain who gave this famous bit of advice, with which, to be honest, I don’t always agree. As a writer of historical fiction set hundreds and thousands of years past, it’s impossible to truly know what happened in those times. I don’t really know if all the […]
Balancing Creative Life
A number of life events pierce a person’s sense of finite time. Becoming a parent sits high on my list. My husband craved financial stability before we decided to start a family. For me, it was feeling the sting of our temporal existence; I watched my mother and aunt battle cancer at the same time. […]
What’s Your “3×3 Rule” Tally?
All right, ladies. We all want to write a wonderfully layered and complex book, right? Well, here’s a formula I implement into each and every chapter with the intention of creating wonderfully layered and complex drafts. I call it the 3×3 Rule. Start 1-3 new threads Continue 1-3 threads Teach us 1-3 new things about […]
Q&A with Kate Brandes
Kate Brandes is the debut author of THE PROMISE OF PIERSON ORCHARD (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2017) and a member of and contributor to WWWB. There is no better feeling than when one of our own makes it. We are so proud of and happy for you, Kate! About her – “I grew up all over the east […]
Radio Daze: How Working In Broadcasting Influences My Fiction
“Let the listener invent their own dragon.” I can’t remember who uttered this line, but it has stayed in my mind since last century, when I took a BBC News Skills training course in London. The nervy young broadcast journalists renamed it News Kills. Until a man in tweed came to our stuffy classroom to […]
So You Want to Be a Detective
We writers are many things. Sometimes, our subjects make us into even more. When writing and promoting The Magician’s Lie, which features a stage magician as its main character, I did a lot of thinking about the similarities between illusionists and novelists. And to write my new book Girl in Disguise, inspired by the life […]
Litsy: Connect to Readers, As a Reader
Last year, I doubled the number of books that I usually read. From the time I made one simple change to the end of the year, I read an average of eleven books a month. That simple change: I joined Litsy. Litsy is a social media platform for readers. Users (sometimes called Littens) post blurbs […]
Believe It, She’s Tried
In 1995, I probably could have published my first novel, Landings. But I didn’t. For the next ten years I wrote almost nothing. Telling this story means explaining the cluster of years that diverted me, those three years when I lost a marriage, a literary agent, and a job. The job wasn’t such a big […]
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