Category: On Writing
Pamela Skjolsvik: Character Interview
In Skjolsvik’s latest, the cure for vampirism is much like the 12-step treatment for alcoholism, and Veronica goes to meetings just to make bearable the maddeningly boring life of being a middle-aged female vampire. An event as mundane as a trip to a tanning salon has Veronica facing her hunger for the dim-witted Britney, her […]
Interracial Friendship in Fiction By Jill McCroskey Coupe
In my novel Beginning with Cannonballs, two infant girls, Hanna and Gail, share a crib in Gail’s parents’ house, where Hanna’s mother is the live-in maid. This is in the 1940s in segregated Knoxville, Tennessee, where I grew up. Despite having to attend different schools, the girls become close childhood friends. After that, it’s not […]
Interview with Barbara Linn Probst
Barbara Linn Probst Tell us about your new book! What is The Sound Between the Notes about? As Kirkus Reviews has described it, The Sound Between the Notes is “a sensitive, astute exploration of artistic passion, family, and perseverance.” It’s a story about what happens when a woman—a pianist—who’s always struggled with identity is given […]
Brittney Morris Interviews Alex Rufus
“Morris succeeds in blending moments of ‘Black boy joy,’ superhuman abilities, intergenerational trauma, mental health (including a description of self-harm), and loss into a resonant story of fraternal love that first compels, then devastates, and will be remembered for a long time.” —Publishers Weekly, starred About THE COST OF KNOWING Dear Martin meets They Both Die at […]
Writing About Social Injustice, With Monsters
Blending fact with fiction is complicated enough. But when the fact is a well-known tale of social injustice that happened in a place that would later become home to a beloved baseball team, let’s just say I approached the project like a prickly pear cactus. I’m talking about Chavez Ravine, home of the Los Angeles […]
A Yearning To Connect
A Yearning To Connect There are many ways that writers fight the isolation inherent in what we do. One is forging alliances with other writers, building a community that understands the creative process and comes together to celebrate the triumphs and soothe the sting of the rejections. Over the past six years and a newbie […]
RUTHLESS WOMEN: Excerpt
“A juicy tale of bitterness, jealousy and revenge. The perfect summer page turner – don’t miss it” —Heat “Melanie Blake is Jackie Collins for a new generation – The Thunder Girls is the perfect summer read” —Bella Magazine RUTHLESS WOMEN Ruthless Women takes readers on a wild ride behind the scenes of beloved TV drama Falcon Bay, beamed […]
On Writing Emotional Repatterning
A number of years ago, I went to see a psychic who was supposed to be very good. It wasn’t my first experience seeing a psychic, nor do I suppose will it be my last. It was a very interesting reading, for numerous reasons, but one thing in particular didn’t seem accurate: she told me […]
Michelle Major’s Character Interview with Meredith Ventner
In Magnolia, North Carolina, love might be waiting right next door… Meredith Ventner knows a wounded creature when she sees one. Though her temporary new neighbor may be—on the surface at least—a successful, drop-dead gorgeous doctor, she recognizes the deep hurt Ryan Sorensen is carrying, and it’s catnip to her soul. But even though Meredith is […]
Writing to Transgress: A fight against feeling like a fraud
Neda Aria Pema Chödrön, an American nun in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in an interview in 1993 said, “my models were the people who stepped outside of the conventional mind and who could actually stop my mind and completely open it up and free it, even for a moment, from a conventional, habitual […]
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