Category: How To and Tips
“Denuding” Myself: A Path to Authenticity as a Woman
“Denuding” Myself A Path to Authenticity as a Woman You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. —William Faulkner I have been involved in writing/editing/publishing all my life. Also, I love a wide scope, being a dual national, US/Belgian. To write my memoir about my New York City days, I got the strong […]
The Real Inspiration for my Fictitious Setting by Kristin Harper
One of my favorite compliments I’ve received about setting came from a reader who told me she’d added Dune Island—the location for my women’s fiction series—to the top of her list of must-see vacation destinations. Although I regretted having to tell her the island doesn’t actually exist, I was delighted and flattered that she was […]
My Creative Process: Julianna Baggott
My creative process doesn’t have edges. I am writing all the time. I experience the world as me but simultaneously as an artist looking for moments when the story world and the actual world bounce light off of each other. I am constantly running a story in my head, sometimes a few of them. I […]
Feeling Fraudulent: A Brown Woman Writes From a White Man’s Point of View
Feeling Fraudulent: A Brown Woman Writes From a White Man’s Point of View I’m a big fan of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher and others. I’m also a big fan of Copenhagen, my adopted city where I lived for eleven years. So, I knew […]
IS THERE MORE THAN ONE WAY TO TELL A STORY? THOUGHTS ON NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
Is there more than one way to tell a story? Thoughts on narrative structure I have a friend who I met online through a TV show fandom (Bones) and while the fandom and later fanfiction brought us together, we later became fast friends. Because we live in different parts of the country and because we […]
When Empathy Gets in the Way By L.S. Stratton
When Empathy Gets in the Way By L.S. Stratton I’d only been covering her case for three days, and I was already having nightmares. She was fifteen when she was murdered. According to her friends, she was well liked though not particularly outgoing. She’d given a shy smile at the camera in her high school […]
FICTION AS A CULINARY ART By Christina Hamlett
FICTION AS A CULINARY ART By Christina Hamlett I was in elementary school when I first realized there was a correlation between cooking and my favorite hobby—reading. I couldn’t really have told you who was bringing all these wonderful tomes to the neighborhood bookmobile every week; like meals at our house, they simply appeared when […]
How my Apparel Sales Career led to a Writing gig
I had always envisioned a career as a journalist, but life had other plans. Right after my college graduation, our family had an emergency while my apparel sales rep dad was at a trade show in Atlanta. When no one from his companies could cover for him so he could attend to the emergency, dad […]
Michelle Cruz: On Writing
If I’m honest, it’s Tom Clancy and John Grisham’s faults. Although they weren’t exactly approved authors in my ultra-conservative upbringing, at least they weren’t forbidden. But there were few women, and—especially in Tom Clancy’s case—they were tangential to the plot, barely mentioned, and often more of a footnote. So in all the audacity of my […]
The Book of Nature: An Offhand Beginning
The Book of Nature: An Offhand Beginning by Barbara Mahany Every book has its backstory, and my most recent, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books, March 21, 2023), is one that began in the unlikeliest of ways. There I was, a half-hour deep into a radio talk […]
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