Category: On Writing
Character Interview: Kathleen Reidy
At twenty-nine, Chelsea Lefevre’s life choices have been considered and prudent, meant to secure her on a shore far from the rocky place where she started out. Yet as Engineering a Love Story opens, the strands of Chelsea’s steady and safe life are unravelling. But I don’t know any of that. To me, Chelsea is […]
We the Living by Jocelyn Rasmussen
Every bone and joint aches. My heart races, and my stomach is kind of seasick. The ground is unpredictable and might meet my face instead of my feet. Ignoring the side effects of chemotherapy, I risk the yellow morning. The meadows have swallowed the late summer sun and offer it back to the sky in […]
The Romance of Ruins by Louisa Morgan
I happened to be touring the beautiful Middle Rhine area of Germany at the same moment that my newest Arthurian novel (The Faerie Handmaid) was being released in the United States. Many travelers, myself included, visit that romantic region because of the numerous castles, particularly on the Middle Rhine. They are best seen from the […]
Five Seasonal Thrillers to Set the Fall Mood By Tessa Wegert
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 […]
The Journey That Inspired Camel from Kyzylkum by Lara Gelya
I was born and raised in Ukraine during the Soviet era, in a world shaped by discipline, endurance, and quiet resilience. My childhood was a complex mosaic. Life was certainly not easy, and the shadow of antisemitism was a heavy, painful reality we had to navigate. Yet, in our neighborhood, Jewish and Ukrainian families lived […]
About a Boy By Tara Badstubner
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 […]
The Process of Writing A Dream Life by Wendy Swift
Over twenty years ago, I had a conversation with a friend who wrote children’s books reviews for Publisher’s Weekly. I told her I would like to write a memoir. She quickly said, no one is interested in reading a memoir unless it is about a celebrity. That may have been true then, or maybe that […]
October Recommended Reads
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 […]
Writing the Story I Once Tried to Survive By Nikki Laycy
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 […]
Why I Filled My Novel with Unlikely Friendships and Eccentric Characters by Linda K. Sienkiewicz
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 […]
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