Category: How To and Tips
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 […]
High Tide in the Redwoods: Memoir, Migration and This Wilderness in My Blood
High Tide in the Redwoods: Memoir, Migration and This Wilderness in My Blood By Terra Trevor My bags were packed, boxes stacked, and escrow was closing. We were downsizing, and moving from the city where we lived for the past forty-three years. We didn’t have a new house to move into, not yet. While we […]
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