Category: How To and Tips
Is Your Perception Of Creativity Hurting Your Writing?
I was talking to a friend of mine—who happens to be a psychotherapist and has experience working with creative professionals—about creativity. The two of us go for weekly walks amidst nature where we talk about life, challenges, and wins. Both the friendship and our weekly self-care ritual is cathartic. I confessed to her that on […]
Battle Cry
I am a woman who is queer and who enjoys sex, and who is generally positive and, perhaps naively, has faith that the world and the people in it are fundamentally ‘good’ and in their nature predisposed not to judge each other. As a writer and an academic, especially at the very start of my […]
A Teacher Encourages: A Writer is Born
I cannot remember what the story was called but I can remember its opening line. “Pooh! Not those smelly socks again.” It was a short memoir from the point of view of an old, disgruntled washing machine and I was surprised to be asked to read it aloud. I was ten years old and painfully […]
Questions No One Should Ask A Writer
The other day, someone said to me, “Hey, you’re a writer, aren’t you?” and I looked at the person suspiciously like, “Why? Do you need a poem for your grandpa’s birthday? Because I’m not good at the rhyme-y stuff.” But she responded, “No, ha-ha! I was just wondering if there are any questions that no […]
Writing Coercive Control Into Fiction (Very, Very Carefully)
This September sees the paperback publication of my first legal thriller, Degrees of Guilt, under the pen name HS Chandler. It was difficult to write for a number of reasons, but the most immediate of them was having proper consideration for the real victims of coercive control. This year has seen the overturning of a […]
On Writing: Angela Meyer
On the plane on the way over to the UK for my book tour I watched a beautiful Scottish film called Tell it to the Bees. While it was essentially a story of both love (between two women) and friendship (between adults and children), there were gut-wrenching scenes of oppression. Women’s desires, their thoughts, their […]
Do’s and Don’ts of Including Mental Illness in Your Fiction
In addition to the joy of being an author, I have also had the privilege of being a clinical psychologist for the last fifteen years. In fact, I practice in mental health full-time as a Pediatric and Perinatal Psychologist and I write in my spare time. My Psychologist job has greatly influenced my writing as […]
What Happened When I Gave Up My Amazon Sales Rank for Lent By Sandra Hutchison
In 2017 I made a little chunk of money as an indie novelist on Amazon, thanks to my first novel THE AWFUL MESS being in one of their Prime reading promotions. Including that one, I had three stand-alone novels out, and I enjoyed some read-through of the others, too, especially in Kindle Unlimited. But as […]
Give Yourself Permission To Slack Off
We, women are too hard on ourselves, especially those of us who are moved to create. In order to tap into our creativity, the world must be shut away, at least for a space of time. Easier said than done when we have so many competing priorities. When we do manage to carve out a […]
Let’s Hear It for Book Clubs!
As an author, I love visiting with book clubs. Do you? As a reader, I love being part of a book club for all sorts of reasons you will see below. Recently there seems to have been a marked upswing in book clubs inviting authors to visit both in person or online. IMHO, nothing beats […]
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