Category: On Writing
The Truth About My Memoir
I’ve written articles and blogs and given many talks—both before and after my book was published—about why I wrote my memoir. It’s not that the reasons I talked and wrote about aren’t true; it’s just that they weren’t fiercely true. Accessing my truth hasn’t always come easy. Let’s just say the truth played hide and […]
Bad Girls
She’s just too mean. That’s the comment I heard from an agent about the protagonist in the manuscript that I was pitching about nine years ago. That’s fine, I thought. Different strokes, right? Then I heard it again from a different agent that I had queried: “She’s so mean. It makes me not care about […]
Novels, The Movies, and Me
Some novelists go to graduate school to get MFA’s. I went into the movie business instead. Permit me to share a memory from my time working as a Veep for the Samuel Goldwyn Company. I was in London for several weeks with a screenwriter named Paul. One day, after working on a script for several […]
Houses As Inspiration
We talk about how our relationships have changed us but comparatively little about how a love affair with a house can alter the course of our thinking and our lives. Where we live is our second skin, for women often part of our identity, so perhaps it’s no wonder that all my novels have been […]
Women Writing the Erotic: Sexual Themes in Fiction
Love, yearning, loss, truth and deceit, freedom and constraint: these themes have long occupied a place in our literary canon. From classical literature, we’re familiar with the torment between Cathy and Heathcliff, and between Jane and Rochester. Within the subtext of these two classic stories of love, lies a narration of sex and sexual desire, […]
How Ancestral Research Can Lead to Memoir
In November, 2011, ten years and one month after the death of my mother, Nannie B Chandler Nelson at age ninety-six, I found myself eager to explore my ancestral roots through her blood line. The challenge was more significant than me, I believe, than for a person who has visited with, and heard tales of […]
Get A Real Job!
Imagine asking a best-selling author for advice on your writing career and being told to get a real job first? Well, that’s essentially what happened on Twitter last week when Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, started a bit of a controversy with this tweet: ‘English Major = Want Fries With That? Pick something […]
From Private Investigator to Author
I knew I wanted to be a singer at age nine, and so I practiced singing every day. At age 13, I learned to play guitar and began writing songs. My mission: write a song of love, peace, hope that would heal the world. A grand dream that led me on a journey of frustration […]
Novelist Or Poet?
When I was thirteen years old, I announced that I was going to be a poet when I grew up. I had already been writing poetry for years – since the age of 10 – and both my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Alexander, and my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Melchior, had encouraged me. Mrs. Melchior, […]
Blogging On And On…
I have to thank Clare Mackintosh. Not only for her brilliant books (I Let You Go and I See You) but for a class she did last January in conjunction with Writers & Artists. Her talk was about social media and building an author platform. At that stage, I had written one book and was […]
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