Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Authors Interviewing Characters: Evette Davis
THE OTHERS SUMMARY: Olivia Shepherd is a political consultant with a secret: She possesses empathic abilities, the power to sense the emotions of those around her. Keen to keep her supernatural gifts hidden, Olivia’s world is upended when Elsa, an ancient time-walker, appears in her kitchen, unveiling a destiny she never knew she had. As […]
Seasoned Romance Empowers us All
A decade ago my friends and I started a monthly gathering called “Dirty Old Women.” There we were, in our fifties and sixties, reading our sexy stories to a packed audience in a California bookstore. Women in their thirties would thank us afterwards because everywhere else they went, the message they heard was romance and […]
What Hallmark Taught Me by Mary Flynn
By Mary Flynn On the very first day that I “cared enough to send the very best,” I sat down with the Editorial Director of Hallmark Cards in Kansas City. I admit I felt intimidated. As someone who routinely wrote book reviews for The New York Times, Web Schott was the most serious and erudite […]
The Inspiration for my Book: A Song, Chekhov’s Gun, and Heroes
By I.M. Aiken The wisdom at our dining table involved “write what you know.” What does a kid know? My answer was: join the volunteer fire department, earn your EMT, work in the inner city on urban ambulances, sail the oceans on long voyages, work as a cook, teach skiing professionally, move to Alaska, spend […]
Researching a Book in the Time of Covid, and What I Learned
By Pamela Toler One of the oddities of my career path as a writer of historical non-fiction is that I didn’t have the chance to do archival research for my first nine books. In some cases this was because I often had ridiculous deadlines, which did not leave time to hunker down in an archives […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Cynthia Reeves
Cynthia Reeves’s novel The Last Whaler is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous […]
Something New From Something Old – On Creating a Linked Story Collection
I grew up in a family of dedicated New Yorker readers, and my taste was formed early on by the stories of J.D. Salinger, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Carver. Decades of reading would pass before I started writing myself, but when I did, back in 2009, my hope was to publish a collection. A goal that seemed […]
Turning Trauma into Fiction for Young Adults
In 2017, I published my young adult urban fantasy novel *The Great and the Small*, a story delving into themes of good and evil that had intrigued me since childhood. The first edition primarily followed Ananda, a troubled teenage girl, and Fin, a young tunnel rat who, as a loyal follower of his uncle, the […]
Vermilion Harvest: Playtime at the Bagh by Reenita Hora: Excerpt
Reenita Hora is the unrivaled ‘Nora Ephron’ of South Asian storytelling, spinning yarns as eclectic as Mumbai’s iconic ‘Bhel Puri’ – a tantalizing concoction of flavors with an occasional bug for that extra crunch! Her stories star a motley crew of characters caught in the whirlwind of gloriously imperfect scenarios, all while stubbornly refusing to […]
From Super Collaborator to Solo Historical Novelist
By Peggy Joque Williams If I could claim to have a writerly Superpower, it’s that I am a great collaborator. As far back as sixth grade I was collaborating with friends, spending our summer evenings brainstorming and passing around the notebook as we wrote the next great Beatles movie after A Hard Day’s Night came […]
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