Category: On Writing
Rice-A-Roni and French Fries: Fear and the Juxtaposition of Art and Life
‘Life imitates art,’ or so the old cliché goes. I wonder, though, if it isn’t the other way around. After all, another cliché tells us to ‘write what you know.’ So, does art imitate life? This question ran in a continuous loop in my mind as I wrote Flygirl, the story about Tris Miles, a […]
Musicals And Writing
When I agreed to write a piece for this fabulous website about how musical theater influences my writing, my first thought was: “How long am I allowed to ramble?” My second was: “How do musicals NOT influence my writing?” Full disclosure, though you can probably tell from the [Title of Show] reference in the title, […]
Writing And Belonging, Daisy McNally
I came to live in a city five years ago and felt foreign and uneasy for the first twelve months and the best part of the next. Of course, cities are busy places and that was not unexpected. It just seemed that all the all the busy-ness was connected; whether those I came across were […]
How Fire Led To Writing
In March 2017, a fire ripped through my home, burning off the roof and destroying most of the interior. Thankfully nobody was injured but I was in the house alone when the fire took hold. The feeling of helplessness, as I stood outside and watched the flames and smoke billow from my house, is something […]
The Inspiration Behind Blood For Blood
‘Where do you get the ideas for your books?’ is one of the questions many writers I know dread. Afterall, how do you explain the apparently illogical flashes of inspiration that seem to come out of nowhere? The follow-up to BLOOD FOR BLOOD (NOTHING TO LOSE, coming out at the end of March) popped into […]
Love_Is_Love: Anthology For LGBTQIA+ teens
Love_Is_Love is a collection of poems, short stories, and visual art for LGBTQIA+ teens, edited by Emma Eden Ramos. We are delighted to share one of the collection’s poems and two of the artworks. Shapeshifter By Robin Anna Smith I exist somewhere between ` a match and a flame, a tear and the sea, a […]
Writing a Novel on Ballet in Pre-Revolutionary Russia
Historical fiction allows us to time travel; we step into the past with a sense of wonder and awe, and the famous names become more than a list of people we learned about in textbooks and school history classes. They become people. The idea for my historical fiction novel was sparked by a single sentence. […]
Light Shines in the Darkness
Drenched with guilt, I raced to the altar to confess my sins. I was six years old. I was full of guilt and shame because I was being sexually abused by the hired man on our farm. Nine years later I was sexually abused by my brother-in-law, Edmond. I told my parents but they only […]
Every Story Is A Survival Story
For as long as I can recall I’ve been trying to save things. I remember clearly the baby robin that fell out of its nest. My mother and I fed him and kept him in a birdcage, so a cat couldn’t get him, right under the cherry tree he fell from in our backyard. Every […]
Writing versus Not Writing
Most of us writers are plagued by bad habits: we repeat a pet phrase five times in a chapter and don’t even notice, we use too many adverbs, too many fancy dialogue tags. Some of us have even been known to hold ourselves hostage to our own perfectionism. But I think there is general agreement […]
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