We all know that the official history of the world’s various regions is always written by the victors. Yet, certain quiet souls contribute to shaping it-souls whose radiance illuminates an entire region, reaching the very places where ordinary people feel forgotten by everyone and everything. Before I reveal the process I followed to write the […]
This year, tomorrow, 9/11, falls on a Friday. For me, 9/11 will always be a Tuesday. Twenty-five years ago, I woke up early after a sleepless night. I had a big day. Bravo cable network was holding a press conference at a swanky hotel downtown for our first reality series – The It Factor, and […]
On October 29, 2021, my mother was released from an involuntary psychiatric hold in British Columbia. Four hours later, she died through Canada’s assisted-dying program, officially known as Medical Assistance in Dying. She was sixty-one, she was not terminally ill, and three days earlier, she had attempted suicide. In the years since, I have returned […]
…when I set out to write a book on aging and menopause in Japan. So, every time I got my period I felt like I got an extension. After finishing the book, I missed my periods for several months in a row, and thought I had just easily transitioned into menopause. Not quite. About 6 […]
For much of my professional life I worked in construction and space management. My work was about understanding how pieces fit together—to how take an idea, develop a plan, solve problems, and bring it all together into something that could stand on its own. I learned that building anything worthwhile takes time, and it takes […]
A dozen years ago, I fell in love with a strange little book first published in 1919 by an author named Sherwood Anderson. Called Winesburg, Ohio, it’s composed of 22 “tales” narrating the lives of 22 residents of a small Midwestern town. We meet a schoolteacher who, past ten o’clock on a snowy winter night, […]
A teacher once told me that if you want to write about trauma in memoir, you’d best wait a decade to do it. At the time I thought this was silly. Why not write while the details were still fresh? But I’ve come to see the wisdom in it: distance is what lets a memoirist […]
The spreadsheet headers were crisp. The follow-up formulas were locked. The list of contacts was promising. I selected the elevator pitch for my memoir in the Notes app and copied it. Yet my thumb hovered over the DM. I couldn’t make myself paste. I closed the social app. Twenty-seven years of sales, business development, and […]
A few days ago, I was sitting on my couch, typing away on my laptop, when I heard four heavy thumps. I looked out the window and saw the UPS man leaving. On my porch sat four boxes of my new book. I lifted one of the thirty-pound boxes, carried it inside, and opened it […]
When I committed myself ten years ago to write my memoir, The Mould Maker, about my relationship with my transgender father. I had to figure out how to set up a sustainable practice for, what was to me, a mammoth task. For most accomplished writers I know and have read about, the common advice is […]
IN THIS LIFE OR ANOTHER On the brink of death, a man comes to terms with the life he lived versus the one he never pursued in an emotionally rich novel of parallel lives, redemption, and finding purpose. On the eve of his sixtieth birthday, mechanic Rusty Wilson takes a bullet to save the patrons […]
Have You Seen Romit? When twenty-five-year-old Romit, Usha’s adopted son, doesn’t respond to her calls, she has a sinking feeling in her stomach. Her husband, Om, who has never accepted their adopted son, tries to convince her to move on. With time, though, it’s clear Usha is right: Romit has gone missing. When the police […]
Interview with Noli Cooper, lawyer and investigator, protagonist in Mortal Zin MORTAL ZIN When corporate attorney Noli Cooper visits her godparents’ Santa Cruz Mountain winery, she’s hoping for a few quiet days to consider her future. But the future will have to wait. The body of her childhood mentor, a crusading social justice lawyer and […]
The Soufflé Also Rises (The Lizi Cleverly Midlife Badass Detective Series) A laugh-out-loud midlife reinvention caper set in Paris for fans of Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan series and Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age. It’s 2008 and Lizi just can’t catch a break. On the heels of a nasty divorce and a paltry settlement agreement—barely enough to […]
In 1912 aboard the RMS Titanic, Nabiha “Bea” Nohra is traveling to America to find work, eager to earn the funds necessary to afford passage for the family she left in Lebanon. On the same ship, heiress Marguerite Ashby sails home to celebrate her engagement to a dull British lord, a marriage that will secure her […]
By Carmen Amato “We’re going analog,” he said. “Analog?” I echoed. I was speaking to David Bruns, who with J.R. Olson co-writes the military-espionage Command and Control series. He explained that they’re skipping a digital-first playbook. Instead they’re leaning into an analog marketing strategy built around thematic speaking engagements, such as with veterans’ groups. It’s […]
Your dream finally came true. You wrote a book, you found a publisher who loved it as much as you do, and now, your book is in your hands. You’re officially a published author. After the unboxing and the champagne, you sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in… And that’s where the […]
By Carol Hoenig If you’re like me, you worked on your novel for a number of years before it’s ready for publication. Then once it is published there’s the feeling of accomplishment and celebration along with upcoming events and interviews. But about six months later you discover you’ve had your opportunity to get readers but […]
By Zelly Ruskin I thought the hard part was going to be finishing the book. Then I published. The image of an author is often one of someone chewing a pencil, with wads of papers beneath their chair. Maybe they’d be deep in thought, or frazzled—or both. In today’s world, they are sitting uninspired at […]
It’s impossible to forget the thrill of the moment when you come across a great idea for a novel. For me, the idea was a child with past life memories of being a soldier in Vietnam and the challenges this presented his mother as she looked for answers. As I wrote, this grew into alternating […]
Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA Folio Literary Management, VP and Literary Agent Erin Niumata has been in publishing for over three decades. She started as an editorial assistant at Simon and Schuster in the Touchstone/Fireside division for several years; then moved over to Harper Collins as an editor, and then she went to Avalon […]
Three years ago, I was a freelance writer with an extremely long Word document chilling on my hard drive. Today, those 98,000 words mark my shift from aspiring writer to fiction author: The Lost Night is coming out from Crown. My novel is a thriller about a woman uncovering the dark truths surrounding her best […]
A few days ago I did an interview and one of the questions was did I think having an agent was crucial in this business. The answer for me was a huge, resounding yes. My agent is Carly Watters at P.S. Literary Agency, and I literally wouldn’t be where I am now without her patient […]
A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series Part One Part Two | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION ELEVEN Historically, how many story ideas do you […]
A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series. Read Part One HERE | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION SIX Did your first agented manuscript sell? If […]
At seventeen, Eileen Worsell left her job in a glass bottle factory in the hustle and bustle of Hackney, London, and volunteered for war work. She was sent to a Women’s Timber Corps training camp in a quiet, rural village in Suffolk. She began learning a job that few people in the 1940s believed a […]
Every family has a story, and sometimes, telling that story means confronting the parts of the past that have remained unspoken. In Who Stole My Pork Belly?, author Huey Choi opens the door to a deeply personal journey shaped by family, loss, identity, resilience, and healing. Rooted in Choi’s Korean heritage, food becomes more than […]
(Some answers to the question of what it is like to have a book out in the world). “It must be incredible to have One Bad Mother published,” people say. “What an accomplishment.” “Mmmm.” I want to tell them that it much like having teenagers. And that I don’t always love it. In many of […]
My new book is about more than just the two-hundred-year saga of Girl Scout founder Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Low’s family. The book also reflects my own thirty-five-year love affair with this subject matter. In some ways this love affair goes back even further, to my days as a Girl Scout, but the writing process began […]
I am an imposter. I learned this recently in a conversation on #AuthorThreads. According to a certain way of thinking, or certain people’s way of thinking, I have for some time unknowingly been a writing fraud. The label would be acceptable to me (if a little harsh) had it been assigned with the explanation that […]
In This Life Or Another, Melissa Payne On the brink of death, a man comes to terms with the life he lived versus the one he never pursued in an emotionally rich novel of parallel lives, redemption, and finding purpose. On the eve of his sixtieth birthday, mechanic Rusty Wilson takes a bullet to save […]
I began writing books at seventy. There is a tendency to describe anything begun later in life as a second act, a reinvention, a brave departure from the life that came before. Writing did not feel that way to me. I did not arrive late. I arrived with material. By the time I began to […]
There was a cluster of old, gnarled trees across the street from where I stood. And I knew by the look of them that, if they could talk, those trees would be a great source of oral histories. You might think that what I’m about to say is going a bit too far, or at […]
A Stern Vow and Unexpected Opportunities In my twenties, when I was beginning a successful IT career, I also remained dedicated to the creative goals I had dreamed of since childhood. I created a high bar for myself, resolving: I won’t have a child until I have published a book. No lengthy thought process went […]
It’s been almost 15 years, but I remember what the agent said when saying no to my book: “I just don’t identify enough with the characters.” My book was a memoir. Since the “characters” were myself, my husband and daughter I probably should have felt that rejection quite a bit more deeply than I did. Here’s the […]
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