Category: How To and Tips
From Damsel to Warrior: How Disney Princesses Shaped My Memoir
Once upon a time, women were taught to wait. Wait for Prince Charming, for the shoe to fit, for the happily ever after. But what happens when you realize life doesn’t come with a fairy godmother to wave her wand and grant your dreams? You grab a sword, get on a white horse, and get […]
A World Of Words
Señora Dull was my third-grade Spanish teacher. My eight-year-old friends and I found this hilarious. Señora Dull was my first language teacher, and in addition to basic vocabulary, useful phrases, and rhymes which I still remember (Chicle puesto en el cesto no molesta a la maestra), she taught us the difference between a ‘stop D’ […]
Keeping Promises to Ourselves and Getting to the Finish Line—- and Beyond
By Lynne Shaner I started writing what would become my debut novel more than ten years ago. The first draft was messy and awful and all over the place, in the way firsts drafts are (mine, anyway). I printed it out it and boxed it up and lugged it halfway across the country. I tucked […]
On The Inspiration for Violet is Blue by Anne Shaw Heinrich
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood the gravity of a bounced check. Once I figured out that a checkbook was only as good as my rapidly fluctuating account balance at the bank, the act of writing a check to pay for anything felt like risky business. A bounced check can represent […]
Writer’s Block and the Refrigerator
What is the spark that ignites your creativity? What sets your imagination on fire, sending you to your laptop or notebook to record those thoughts before they fly away? What keeps you moving forward? This is the best part of writing, letting the words fly across the page as your characters take shape and you […]
They Said What? Reader Reactions to The Marriage Debt
By Christina Consolino When I first began writing my latest novel, The Marriage Debt, I had women readers in mind. After all, the main topic—menopause—is a “normal” part of aging that affects many women. As I fleshed out Nika and her husband, Ethan, their relationship, Nika’s relationship with others, and how prevalent perimenopausal and menopausal […]
Snark Comes to Spark by Ellen Notbohm
As I wake this morning after another night of badly broken sleep, I see my pencils sitting there on the nightstand in the half-light, their points dulled from the last time I used them. Which was—when? My weary thought is, I can’t write this morning. My pencils are dull. My pencils are pointless, literally and figuratively. […]
Try it, You Might Like it: 5 Reasons to Write Micro Fiction
A micro fiction challenge might be the most fun you can have while improving your writing If you’d told me a few years ago that a micro fiction challenge would change my mind about writing super short stories, I probably would have scoffed. Because writing short is hard (and writing short and well is even […]
Writing Sea Change: How a Girl Who Hated Science Became a Science Fiction Author
By Susan Fletcher My mother was a chemist. Back in the 1940s, she did some of the first research on smog in the Los Angeles basin. One of my sisters is a mathematician and computer scientist; my other sister is a physical therapist. My sister-in-law runs a biochemistry lab at Stanford, and my daughter has […]
What I Didn’t Know
by Beverly Burch It started with stories, a series of short fiction over a period of years. Some I published in literary journals, some lived on my computer, but the characters began to recur. I didn’t know they were going to do that. In a story with a new character, a woman from an earlier […]
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