Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Q&A with Nancy Cleary, Founder, Designer, Chief Hand-Holder and Cheerleader at Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing is an award-winning independent press nestled on the Oregon coast in a tiny town called Deadwood. Nancy Cleary has spent over twenty-five years as a professional graphic designer and author branding expert. Wyatt-MacKenzie has published hundreds of products over the last 18 years with a special focus on mom writers. They traditionally publish […]
Judge a Book By Its Cover
Never judge a book by a cover. It’s great advice – except when it’s applied to a book. We all judge books by their covers, and people who write, design and market books know this. We make decisions in an instant based on the look of a book; whether or not we’ll even pick the […]
Blindness, Art Theft And Creation Of A Story
A few months ago, I received a letter from an old acquaintance. While reading about the masterpieces stolen from the Gardner Museum, she recalled another art theft near Boston, in the 1970s and googled my ex husband. Finding nothing, she googled me and discovered the novel I’d written about our relationship. I called him Angus, […]
Speaking Up for Those Who Can’t Answer Back
Some of my most prominent memories of grammar school days relate to my sister, Lou, even though she attended the special school across the other side of town. After a swimming lesson in the early nineties, for example, an older boy referred to Lou as a ‘spaz’. I still remember the sudden strength I acquired when […]
How To Build A Character
If you type ‘how to build a’ into Google, you’ll be given the options of shed, fence, house, website. (I don’t think it will be too long before ‘girl’ is added to the list due to Caitlin Moran cornering this part of the literary market.) All of these options give guidance on construction and the […]
Women In Crime Fiction
Women in early crime fiction are often placed in the role of helpless ‘damsel in distress’. This is not inevitably the case. Apart from his nemesis Moriarty, the one person who succeeds in outwitting Sherlock Holmes through sheer strength of character and intelligence is a woman, Irene Adler. But she is perceived as outside the […]
How Collaging and Scrapbooking Helps Me Write Better
I first began collaging soon after I turned thirteen; I still have sketchbooks from those years, page after page filled with collage narratives that I had abstracted from paper pieces ripped from magazines and newspapers. These sketchbooks also contained my tentative forays into water-color painting: a fuchsia bougainvillea blooming beneath a cerulean blue sky, a […]
Why We Write About Paris
What is it about Paris that makes it such a glorious setting for a book? From novels to memoir to cookbooks, Paris has been the setting for countless literary creations over the years. In every genre and style, the City of Light has made an appearance. I’ve contributed to that, writing novel Paris, Rue des […]
Writing My Way to Self-Care
“This book grew out of a desperate plea to myself to figure out a way to take care of me, as I felt I was literally gasping for breath while being swallowed up in the sea of motherhood.” –The Self-Care Solution Most authors embark on their writing journey with a similar mission—to create something that […]
Paintings in Novels
Everyone knows the image of The Girl with a Pearl Earring. The woman’s face turned half towards the viewer, the blue and yellow turban over her hair, the golden robe, and, at the centre of the image, the outsized earring itself. The original hangs in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. But that original is […]
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