Category: On Writing
The Inspiration Behind Sweet Lake
The inspiration behind a book—the impishly persistent idea that darts through my head demanding center stage—never arrives in quite the same way. For Sweet Lake, the frothy potion of the perfect “What if?” mixed with irresistible characters I couldn’t wait to bring to life came about quite by accident. During a busy November, I received a surprising […]
Scientist Turned Women’s Fiction Writer: How My Environmental Science Background Helped Me Find My Writing Voice
I’ve worked most of my twenty-five career, not as a writer, but as an environmental scientist. One of my first memories at age four is of the magnolia tree outside the shabby apartment complex on the outskirts of New Orleans where my family lived at the time. I can still feel the rough bark against […]
The City and the Island
Like most book ideas, Mussolini’s Island came to me by chance. I read an article on the BBC website which recounted a visit, in June 2013, of a group of LGBT activists to the tiny island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. They were there to commemorate and raise awareness of a moment in […]
Writing Team Spirit
Writing a book is a wonderful, yet often lonely business, especially when writing a book about togetherness and the power of camaraderie, like The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. After spending days laboring in front of a laptop in an empty room, I can quickly become fraught with plot-related anxieties, character qualms, voice worries, and that omnipresent […]
My Writing Space
It was cheaper than a divorce. This past summer I came face to face with a huge dilemma: My writing space had been invaded by an alien—the dreaded non-writer husband. As writers, we need our own space. It’s a right of passage. A given. An essential part of this crazy puzzle we call writing. You […]
Behind Every Great Man: The Forgotten Women Behind the World’s Famous and Infamous
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” Virginia Woolf The idea for Behind Every Great Man was the result of serendipity-and it arrived through the unlikely person of former First Lady Laura Bush. In a White House roast, she likened herself to a character from Desperate Housewives. “I am married to the president of […]
Historical Fiction: Making Research Invisible – And Ignoring The Aspidistra
Memory is a cruel thing. It lingers in dark trenches, whispering, or withholding, waiting to creep into the no-man’s-land of our dreams. It knows what we long to remember, and what we hope to forget. And it knows Hearsay and Imagination will cover any gaps… So begins my new novel, The Echo of Twilight. Set […]
The Year I Gave Up Submitting to Literary Magazines
At the end of every calendar year, I review my writing life to assess what I’ve accomplished and to see where my creative path is leading me. What’s working and what isn’t? What patterns are there, and what are they telling me? As 2015 drew to a close, I reviewed my submissions log and noted […]
Why Do We Choose The Stories We Write?
Under the Almond Tree is the story of an Afghan family fleeing the conflict and violence of Afghanistan in the 1990s during the rise of the Taliban, travelling back and forth on the Trans-Siberian Express in search of safety, as narrated by the middle daughter, storyteller Samar. Helped by Napoleon, the ticket collector, and […]
Finding the Pearl: Why I wrote Ghost Variations
Why do you start to write a book? Perhaps more than that, why do you finish it? There are enough books in the world already: why do you need to add yours? The reason I started Ghost Variations is not the same reason I finished it. I can’t count the number of times I nearly […]
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