Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Finding Cecily
Finding Cecily I can’t remember not being able to read. I know Mum taught me, long before school started. It wasn’t that she was a pushy mother. Just that she loved stories and wanted to give me a key to unlock them. We soon left children’s books behind. By 10 or so I’d just read […]
On Being a Writer and an Accountant
On being a writer and an accountant by Gill Darling You may not be surprised to learn that accountancy is not a subject covered much in fiction. The novel that springs first to mind is Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry by the avant-garde novelist BS Johnson, published in 1973. Christie, young and disaffected, hits on […]
Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason: House of Music
Seven brothers and sisters. All of them classically trained musicians. One was Young Musician of the Year and performed for the royal family at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The eldest has released her first album, showcasing the works of Clara Schumann. These siblings don’t come from the rarefied environment of elite music schools, but from a state comprehensive in Nottingham. How did they do […]
Women’s History In The Past and Today: Writing The Accidental Suffragist
Women’s History In The Past and Today When I decided to tackle the huge yet impassioned task of writing a novel, I immediately gravitated to historical fiction. It’s my reading genre of choice as it allows us to be inspired by what really happened and get the back story in an engaging mode. The historical […]
Leadership Flow: Excerpt
In Leadership Flow: The Unstoppable Power of Connection, author Peri Chickering offers a refreshing approach to leadership development—a philosophy that is bold and current and yet, in many respects, as old as humanity. Peri proposes there is a flow—an underlying rhythm to life—that fuels and evokes effective leadership. We can all lead more productively and […]
An Ode to Sticky Notes
Occasionally someone in one of the various on-line writing groups in which I hang out will ask how people organize their research. It usually generates a discussion of digital versus paper filing systems. And I occasionally weigh in with my own multi-layered, always evolving system of computer files, notebooks, 3 x 5 cards, and the […]
Inspiration for THE RECEPTIONIST
Seasoned Los Angeles TV producer Kate Myles makes her fiction debut with THE RECEPTIONIST (Thomas & Mercer; 8/1), a blazing love triangle situated in the world that churns after “Cut!” A top reality talent agent can only look past her TED-Talking business guru husband’s infidelity for so long before she has to take matters into […]
Interview with Jeanne Baker Guy
Cedar Park, Texas – In 1977, Jeanne’s German ex-husband, Klaus, tells her he has a new job and wants to take their three-year-old daughter and six-year-old son away for a long weekend to celebrate. Jeanne relents. But Klaus never returns and instead sends Jeanne a letter, delivered by a priest, in which he declares that […]
Writing Historical Fiction with Debut Novelist Samantha Specks
Inspired by the true story of the thirty-eight Dakota-Sioux men hanged in Minnesota in 1862―the largest mass execution in US history―Dovetails in Tall Grass is a tale of two young women connected by the fate of one man. Writing Historical Fiction with debut novelist Samantha Specks Though my novel is about events in 1862, for me the […]
On Getting the History Right (or Trying to…)
The foundation for All Things That Deserve To Perish, the story of a gifted German-Jewess who finds herself in a fragile mixed marriage, was laid in my early days as a graduate student in history. On reading a biography of Bismarck’s banker, Gerson Bleichroeder, I landed one day on a story that really moved me. […]
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