Category: On Writing
Rape Is A 4-Letter Word
Entangled Moon, my debut corporate suspense thriller novel, opens with a graphic rape and murder scene. Why? Why would a woman subject herself to writing such a thing? Why would she choose such a controversial subject for her debut? Worse, I wrote a second rape scene. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, […]
When One Door Closes…
I’ve always been a fan of possibility. I’m with Emily Dickinson on this (no relation!): ‘I dwell in possibility’ is one of my favourite quotes. In my own life I’ve found that it often arrives when you least expect it, when your attention is summoned elsewhere. In fact, I owe my career as a bestselling […]
On Being Read: Shelf Life
SHELF LIFE Back in the days when I thought it would be a cinch to command a print run of, say, thirty thousand, I used to dream of being read, dozens of readers dawdling over every inch, dallying with each irresistible insight. I thought of our intercourse as a fertile two-way street, spurring us all […]
Waiting for Inspiration
People who are interested in writing sometimes ask: how do you get inspiration? Do you have to sit and wait? No — I give the standard answer: you just sit at your desk or computer and don’t move until you’ve written a thousand words, or whatever you set out to do. As William Faulkner once […]
Growing Through Grief: A Story for Father’s Day
Growing Through Grief: A Story for Father’s Day by Debbie Augenthaler, Author of You Are Not Alone: A Heartfelt Guide for Grief, Healing, and Hope My father was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. A part of me always grieves for him, for how he suffered and how his illness affected our family. And a […]
Read. Write. Reflect.
Our family recently experienced a life-changing medical emergency. As the doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff worked endlessly to save my husband’s life, I was, as a caregiver, on the sidelines. Feelings of helplessness, grief, sadness, and frustration found a home in my heart. During the time of his hospitalization and now, during post-op care, […]
A Writer’s Essentials: A Writing Friend
Over lunch with three writers, one said, “Don’t you love writing prompts, like ‘the first time you got drunk.’” We were off and running, telling the story of the chocolate martinis, or being carried out of a Mexican bar at 18 after two shots of tequila. I leapt on the idea, “This would be a […]
The Truth as I Know It
One of the pitfalls of writing fiction is that people think you are writing about yourself. To some degree, we all are, of course. We weave facts and experiences from our own lives into our stories, and we write about issues and situations we care about. But we are still creating stories, not writing memoir. […]
The Beginning Of Everything
About a month before I finished The Beginning of Everything—which was about three weeks after the book was technically due to my editor—my roof started leaking in a place where it had previously been patched. I was right then in the process of writing about my slow and ongoing recovery from a spontaneous spinal CSF leak […]
Why You Don’t Know My Name
You don’t know my name. And there are a few reasons for it. The first, and most obvious, is we’ve never met. As I prepare to release my debut novel, I am very much at the bottom of the mountain squinting up at its white peak. I have no reader following, a shamefully low amount […]
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