Category: How To and Tips
Taking A Chance On Kindle Vella
By Deb Hunter After I hit the USA Today best seller list in October 2020, I thought…That’s it. No more writing. One more challenge completed. Then, in April 2021, Amazon announced its newest platform, Kindle Vella. Vella is short for novella and I’m a huge proponent of short fiction – short stories, essays, abbreviated novels, […]
Anyone’s Shadow
“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice/And all things nice/That’s what little girls are made of.” When Mother Goose penned her rhyme, little did she realize the heavy load she had placed on female shoulders: to be nice is daunting. And what of those girls who shirked the role of Ms. Goody Two […]
Five Things I Learned From My 1-Year Social Media Hiatus
At the end of May 2020, I did what many of my author friends warned me was career suicide. I closed my social media accounts. All of them. Not just left them dormant with “taking a break” messaging, but actually closed/deleted them. The “why” is difficult for me to explain, because I’m not entirely sure […]
Inside Fictional Minds
As a clinical psychologist who fell into writing fiction by accident, it took a long while for me to stop and reflect on the impact of my profession on characterisation. As a writer, you may find that elements of the story seem to write themselves or attributes of a character appear to come from nowhere, […]
Becoming a Writer: Calibrating the Work Against the Pleasure
I met Jacomena van Huizen Maybeck when I was thirty-three and she was seventy-seven. I’d hoped to rent her cottage, and found her tarring the roof, dressed in a halter top and shorts. I’d never met anyone like her. She knew how to throw a pot, wield an ax or a sickle, and make plum […]
Love and Loss By Habiba Zaman
Love and loss are our greatest teachers in life. We learn what it means to care and act on that love as well as learning the extent to which we have cared by the intensity of the grief when the object of that love is lost. From childhood, we cling to comfort, shared experience, laughter, […]
Five Summer Reads to Nurture the Writer Within
By Kimberly Garrett Brown While most people are booking vacations and picking out swimsuits for the summer, I’m busy planning my summer reading list. It started back when I was in high school. I begin to notice that most of the protagonists or narrators in the books I read often made references to classics. Since […]
So, Is Writing Therapy?
“Know thyself” is a tall order. Is it even possible to uncover—without outside help—what is blocked from conscious awareness? To my great surprise, writing a memoir did just that. I began the memoir almost a decade ago, and during the many years I worked on it, I experienced three epiphanies that completely reversed core beliefs […]
Fall from “Greatness”: My Experience of Anxiety & Panic Attacks, and Why I wrote Generation Panic
When I was in my 20’s, on the surface it seemed like I had it all together. A successful career as a Director managing three teams, earning good money, great family and friends and engaged to be married. However, behind the scenes I was really struggling. I was incredibly ambitious and driven, yet the reality […]
It’s All In Your Mind…Literally!
By F.J. Beerling This is just the beginning. There is also a middle and an end to this story, to any story. My story begins with being different, struggling to find my vocation, knowing there was something out there that would work for me, but not knowing what. One day I announced to a dear […]
Recent Comments