Author Archive: Women Writers Women Books
Dutch by birth and serial emigrant, Barbara currently lives with her husband and daughter in a tiny village in Galicia, Spain, as basic and simple as can be. W Barbara's website.
From New Zealand To Perfectville: The Inspiration Behind My Novel By Yvonne Eve Walus
When my husband and I moved to New Zealand nearly thirty years ago, I fell in love with things that people born here often took for granted. The beaches. The green grass. The sense that children could disappear outside for hours and return muddy, tired and happy. New Zealand felt safe and orderly. It felt […]
The Ultimate Traitor: Background Story by Kathryn Gauci
I was drawn to writing a story about France’s worst serial killer of the 20th– Century, Dr Marcel Petiot, after watching a documentary about him. Writing novels set in WWII France, I was amazed that I had not heard of him before and the more I uncovered, the more astounding his story was. The German […]
Do I Really Want to Rewrite this? By Jane Wilson-Howarth
Way back in 2007, I was fortunate enough to see the publication, by Peir 9 in Australia, of my memoir A Glimpse of Eternal Snows. I’d been working on it off-and-on for 12 years. In essence the book was about David, our middle son who was born with various medical challenges including holes in his […]
Getting Past Stuck: Writing Flow Through Tarot and Improv by Jane Brookwood
Do you ever get stuck in the writing? You have a plan, you know where your characters need to be and how they’re going to get there, but suddenly the action feels flat, the dialogue uninspired, or you simply don’t know where to go next. A stall can sometimes feel like a brick wall, and […]
On Choosing Book Titles by Suzanne Trauth
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose…or is it? “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare was undoubtedly onto something here… though Mark Twain conceded that “names are not always what they seem.” Do the same sentiments apply to book titles? Those […]
Zoje Stage: Authors Interviewing Characters
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, […]
HOME: A Memoir of Family, Forgiveness, and Healing from Complex PTSD by Amy Smyth Miller
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. […]
What Is a Novel-in-Stories, and Why Might You Want to Write One? by Laura Bonazzoli
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, […]
Both Jekyll and Hyde: Writing Memoir in Two Voices by Georgine Hodgkinson
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 […]
On Writing Theophano: Witch or Saint? A Byzantine Historical Novel by Olga Athanasiadou
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 […]
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