As writers, we hear it from everyone—from other writers, from people who teach writing, from readers, and from people who are tired of hearing us groan and whine about writing. (Little do they know how much fun groaning and whining is if you’re sharing it with sympathetic listeners.) Write what you know, they say. It’s […]
By Nikki Laycy, author of Out of the Shadows – From Despair to Self-Acceptance and Love There is something very different about living through painful experiences and sitting down years later to write about them. When I was living through some of the darkest periods of my life, I wasn’t thinking about what they meant […]
You Can Be a Disaster and Still Get Invited to the Fish Fry: At the beginning of Love and Other Incurable Ailments, Serenity Tomczyk doesn’t emerge from loss with newfound wisdom or enviable resilience. She nurses a cat. She attends group therapy. She catastrophizes every headache with a late-night Google search. Years after losing her […]
You Can Be a Disaster and Still Get Invited to the Fish Fry: At the beginning of Love and Other Incurable Ailments, Serenity Tomczyk doesn’t emerge from loss with newfound wisdom or enviable resilience. She nurses a cat. She attends group therapy. She catastrophizes every headache with a late-night Google search. Years after losing her […]
Engineering a Love Story, Kathleen Reidy At the height of the boom, ambition is easy —love is the real gamble It’s the year 2000—dot-coms, Bush v. Gore, and sky-high San Francisco rents. But while the country swoons with irrational exuberance, Chelsea Lefevre’s life is deflating faster than a tech bubble. She’d had everything she thought she […]
I’m a mood reader down to my bones, and very often, my mood is dictated by the season. A chilling locked-room mystery January, a sizzling summer camp thriller in July…if the story or setting corresponds with the weather, I’m in. My latest thriller, The River Runs Black, is set around Halloween, and I’ve loaded it […]
I began writing SAFEKEEPING before the pandemic. The first draft of the novel had a different title. There were different characters. A different plot. The novel worked on many levels. It was polished enough to go out on submission to publishers, and the response was largely enthusiastic. But I knew something was missing. Someone was […]
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 […]
As writers, we hear it from everyone—from other writers, from people who teach writing, from readers, and from people who are tired of hearing us groan and whine about writing. (Little do they know how much fun groaning and whining is if you’re sharing it with sympathetic listeners.) Write what you know, they say. It’s […]
By Nikki Laycy, author of Out of the Shadows – From Despair to Self-Acceptance and Love There is something very different about living through painful experiences and sitting down years later to write about them. When I was living through some of the darkest periods of my life, I wasn’t thinking about what they meant […]
We were sitting in our usual places on Mike’s L-shaped sofa in the brightest room in the house. I was leaning against the arm of the sofa, my feet stretched out to touch Jack, a black and white cat who was glued to Mike’s hip. Mike sat on the chaise of the sofa facing Trout […]
In her memoir-how-to book The Memoir Project, author Marion Roach Smith archly observes that “the #1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book—about themselves.” She’s sold a lot of copies being right about that. I joined that white-haired throng after retiring from a long career in higher education and, […]
Last month, my six-year-old novel The Violin Maker’s Daughter woke up to new life, with a brand-new cover and brand-new energy. It’s been updated, edited, polished. It’s as if a whole book’s out there: except this time, I didn’t spend hours, weeks, and months writing 100,000 words from scratch. Getting here was a long-winded learning-by-doing […]
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 […]
Part satire, part emotional character study, LOOKS PERFECT explores identity, performative culture, and what authenticity means in a hyper-visible world offering a timely look at internet fame and the gap between how we’re seen and who we are. Siskin brings a uniquely informed perspective: a former fashion executive and founder of the viral Instagram brand Misterkrisp, she […]
SOMETHING OF A CALLING Detective Andy Cooper is about to retire. She isn’t sure what’s next … perhaps traveling in the RV she has yet to buy, with a dog she doesn’t currently own. Perhaps gardening near the ever-shrinking patch of woods behind her house-once the cable company’s backhoe is removed. She’ll need to do something, […]
Her past held the answers—if she was brave enough to face it. After nearly losing her husband, Amy Smyth Miller’s panic spirals out of control. Therapy reveals a diagnosis she never expected: Complex PTSD. In search of healing, Amy embarks on a harrowing excavation of her past—childhood neglect, homelessness, parental addiction, and a family history shadowed by suicide. […]
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 […]
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 […]
“The author pulls no punches in revealing things that she’s done….Her frankness is refreshing….An indelible, sharply detailed life story that’s earnest and engrossing.Our Verdict: GET IT.” -Kirkus Reviews I attempted to write Paper Girls Burn a handful of times throughout the last decade. It would go the same way each time. I would write maybe […]
Varina Buntin Willse is an award-winning author of spiritual and narrative nonfiction with degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Oxford University. Her latest book, Beneath and Between: And Other Overlooked Words that Illuminate God, gives readers a fresh vocabulary to experience an ineffable God. Varina is the creative force behind […]
The first book I wrote in was turquoise, with a tiny metal key to lock and unlock it, a key which, at nine years old, I promptly lost. What I found, however, was a best friend for life. For the next five and a half decades, and to this day, I visit with my best […]
My Three Fathers, in some ways started as a love letter to my father Juan—the opening section is implicitly addressed to him. And it’s a letter of reckoning: this is what you missed and yet helped create by your absence. But also, here, I have made this for you. By the time I met my […]
NOWHERE TO GO BUT EVERYWHERE Helena Vinci might like grunge and Camel Lights, but she’s not a fan of frat boys or anything else about Albany college life. When she drops out and takes a job waiting tables near the Capitol, her plan is to save up to see “the real world” out west. But […]
My mother passed away in May 2015, six months after the release of my narrative nonfiction book, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels. When I heard that the book had made the New York Times best seller list, my mother was the first person I called, both of screaming incoherently and laughing through tears. She was the reason […]
Joanne E. Betzler – author of Nothing to Discuss – Breaking From 20 Years of Intimate Partner Violence I grew up believing that abuse means visible scars and bruises. Broken bones. There was zero physical evidence that my 20-year marriage had swallowed me whole and erased my identity. From my insider perspective, the union was […]
Ask me how I came to write of loss and grief. Ask me at night when I’m especially tired, when my guard is down, when my heart is heavy from the slow grind of the day. I will tell you a story, maybe, about a boy, a friend, who was goofy and kind. His gait […]
If Virginia Woolfe was right when she wrote, “the truer the facts the better the fiction” in her classic A Room of One’s Own, there’s no better inspiration for writing a story than a true one. Find an old news clipping from 1892 or a web article published yesterday—you can’t invent anything stranger than the truth. Fiction that […]
As a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a cycling champion, but there was no women’s team at the time. Cycling in public was also forbidden for women. I cycled through the streets of Tehran wearing loose jogging clothes and a cap, trying to look like a boy so I would not be stopped by the morality […]
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