Category: On Writing
My Road To Publication
My debut novel, a psychological thriller called Keep You Safe is published on 17th August. It follows the story of Natalie, who is convicted of a crime she can’t remember committing and separated from her baby son, Harry, for over three years. Her husband has divorced her and taken their son to live on the […]
Becoming Starlight: an Excerpt
Becoming Starlight Excerpted from Becoming Starlight: A Shared Death Journey from Darkness to Light by Sharon Prentice, PhD. Copyright © 2018 by Sharon Prentice. https://sharonprentice.com Heaven. There are many different words for it in many different languages. And each day, it’s a “place” that’s referred to more than any other in the world. Why? Every […]
Will The Real Kinsey Millhone Please Stand Up? –How a Private Investigator Became a Writer
Those of you who are mystery lovers will need no explanation with regard to the title of this piece: Kinsey Millhone is a fictional private investigator who stars in 25 novels penned by the late great Sue Grafton, spanning 36 years and the alphabet from A to Y. I was already a state of California […]
The Unexpected Writing Prompt that Began My Career
I never wanted to be a writer much less an author. Two negative experiences in the classroom convinced me I did not have that talent. In high school, an English teacher I greatly admired reviewed a poem I’d written about the death of my beloved dog. She told me the poem was “maudlin,” a term […]
How Writing Changed My Life
Wings of a Flying Tiger is a heroic tale in which ordinary Chinese risked their lives to rescue and safeguard a downed American pilot in WWII in China. It is a work of fiction. But to me, a Chinese-American, it is also personal. My mother and grandma had lived in Nanking and escaped from the […]
THE ONE-EYED QUEEN: Inspo and Sanity
What inspires me to write is that I’ll go insane if I don’t. It’s very motivating. My first recollection of using it as a coping mechanism, I’m not sure how old I was. Four, maybe five, unable to sleep because I was certain there was a tangle of snakes under my bed. I crept to […]
On Writing: Ausma Zehanat Khan
Crime fiction has no shortage of gutsy, brilliant and intriguingly flawed heroines, so when I set about writing my own mystery series, I knew I wanted one of my detectives to embody those same qualities. Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty are partners who work at Community Policing, a unit that investigates crimes that impact minority […]
Diane Jeffrey on A Sense Of Place
We’ve all read novels where the setting stays with us as much as the characters once we’ve finished reading the last page. The London depicted in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the wild Yorkshire moors in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Middle-earth in JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings books; C.S. Lewis’s Narnia… In many novels, […]
Twin Sisters and a Murder in a Gothic, Boarding-School Setting
By Michele Campbell, author of She Was the Quiet One. My first psychological thriller, It’s Always the Husband, struck a nerve with readers by chronicling the twisted relationships among three young women who meet as freshman roommates at an elite Ivy League college. The book is full of secrets and murder, but also focuses intensely […]
The Dragon at The Gate
The Dragon at The Gate: An Edited Excerpt from Raw: My Journey from Anxiety to Joy, by Bella Mahaya Carter When I was younger, I never knew when my anxiety might get triggered, though I did know that extended family gatherings were likely to stir, if not explode, my issues to the surface. I remember […]
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