Category: On Writing
Once an Immigrant, Always an immigrant!
Clasping a big folder with every document that could prove our existence, my parents and I stood at San Francisco airport waiting for our turn. The words, “Welcome to the United States of America,” dazzled above the immigration officer. It seemed like hours had passed since we got off our flight from India. The lines […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Patricia Harman
Patricia Harman spent over thirty years caring for women as a midwife, first as a lay-midwife, delivering babies in cabins and on communal farms in West Virginia, and later as a nurse-midwife in teaching hospitals and in a community hospital birthing center. Though she loved caring for women and infants, she recently retired to write […]
When My Cat Died and Came Back to Life, I Did What Any Writer Would Do
Recently, Senator Tammy Duckworth mentioned her “Alive Day” anniversary on Twitter. She said, “Today is my Alive Day, the anniversary of the day I almost died but didn’t.” She went on to describe how 14 years earlier, an RPG hit the helicopter she was piloting in Iraq. She lost both of her legs. But instead of […]
Where have all the Mobile Libraries gone? By Olivia Rana
When I was a child I can vividly remember the mobile library coming to my rural school in County Fermanagh. It arrived once a fortnight, bringing great excitement for bookworms like myself, and a welcome break from the tedium of schoolwork. We would promptly line up outside the school gates and wait our turn as […]
How Fairytales Can Deepen Themes in Our Writing
When I was little, my mother read me fairytales. I remember Andrew Lang’s books, The Tall Book of Fairytales, and a peculiar story about a girl who jumped rope and could skip through a key hole and light as a feather on dandelion thistle. It took me years to track down Elsie Piddock Skips in […]
Writing And Location: Jo Platt
Several years ago, having just written my first novel, Reading Upside Down, I was asked by a journalist how important setting was to the book, and to my writing in general. It was an interesting question, with location of course being integral to many novels, often taking centre stage alongside the characters: Cathy and Heathcliff […]
How Writing Made Me More Of A Feminist
What’s an independent woman to do in a world where marrying means losing ownership of everything, even herself? The first book of my Redway Acres series, Helena, references a piece of English law from the early 1800s called Coverture. “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being […]
The Inspiration Behind Counterfeit!, Deception! and Corruption!
When I’m asked about the inspiration behind the Suzanne Jones series, my mind scurries off in a number of directions. The books are all thrillers set in the sometimes murky world of international pharmaceuticals. And hence my thirty plus years working as a manufacturing consultant and technical writer in that industry obviously played a part. […]
Stayin’ Alive: The Space-Time Continuum Applied to Writing a Novel
There are two kinds of people in this world, those who appreciate science fiction and those who do not. Or, in other words, those who are able to grasp the concept of the space-time continuum, the idea that space and time are one and the same, and those who can’t wrap their brains around it. […]
Finding Acceptance and Peace Through the Ceremony of Writing
As a chronically indecisive person, I have a hard time choosing what to order at a restaurant, let alone which restaurant to go to. I get lost in an endless cycle of pros and cons, no matter the decision. So, the really big ones—like whether or not to have a child—can be agonizing. I’d always […]
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