Category: On Writing
Bridging the Past and Present: Writing Romance Rooted in History
By Shanna Hatfield Books have been a wonderful source of adventure for as long as I can remember. My mother shared her love of books with me, reading to me most every night as a young child. When I was old enough to read the books myself, my favorite stories were those that brought the […]
Have Attitudes Towards Women Really Changed Since 1900?
Journalist Caroline McGhie got to explore Victorian attitudes to women’s rights, sexual freedom, religion, art and pornography when writing her debut novel The Sitter. But has anything changed since 1900? How a woman copes after she has been taken advantage of has long been a subject of interest for writers of women’s fiction. More recently […]
September: Reading With Rochelle Weinstein
Hello Readers & Friends, Have any of you been saying all week long: I can’t believe it’s October?! I have. How was your September? Ours was busy with trips to New York and the mountains out west. The fall foliage gets me every single time. The sound of a rippling river. The crisp air. The […]
What are you Reading Now?
By Leslie Kain In the middle of stressful times, do you read escapist novels? Or stories with characters you can’t stop thinking about, stories that pull you in and won’t let you go? In 2021, a book critic declared the “trauma plot” was dead, suggesting it’s a trope that reduces characters to “a set of […]
A Writers Journey in Crazy Persistence
As with many writers, I read voraciously as a kid, particularly Nancy Drew mysteries. I even made my own little editions with crayon-drawn covers and stories bound with staples. In a time where women’s career choices were narrowly defined and did not include mystery/thriller writer, I became an educator and later an administrator, both interesting […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Teddy Jones
A FAMILY OF GOOD WOMEN Imogene Good finds herself wrestling with this question when, still grieving her mother’s death, she abandons a promising teaching career to open a boarding house in the near-lawless oil boomtown of Borger, Texas. Alone. The business thrives, love arrives in the form of mysterious Texas Ranger, and Imogene takes in […]
The Origin Story: Soul Toll, For Anyone Who Has Ever Wondered if Success is Enough
By Anusia Gillespie At 29, I quit my law firm job with six-figure debt and no backup plan. Something had shifted. A meditation as part of a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program cracked something open in me, like a champagne cork popping, and there was no going back. It was as if I’d glimpsed behind […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Tamar Shapiro
RESTITUTION As children in Central Illinois, Kate and Martin were never told much about their mother’s childhood in East Germany. And they rarely asked questions. Decades later in 1989, when the Berlin Wall falls, Kate and Martin are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled […]
HELLO WIFE, by Lisa K. Friedman: Excerpt
HELLO WIFE Single, unfulfilled and well into middle age, long-troubled Charlotte Lansing desperately reaches for love and acceptance. When she announces her engagement to an unemployed morphine addict, her family falls into a tailspin. Her mother is determined to prevent disaster, her father seeks to mend the growing chasm, and her sister stubbornly hopes that […]
Pages of the Past: The Story Behind my Story
Margie Goldsmith, author of “Becoming a Badass: From Fearful to Fierce.” Covid hit. Most of my magazine assignments were experiential travel stories, but with all travel cancelled, now would be the perfect time to write a memoir. Yet, every famous actor, film star and rock star was writing their life story. Who was I? And […]
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