Category: On Writing
Telling the Bees: How a Social Media Post, an Ancient Tradition, and Magical Realism Inspired My New Novel, Bees in June
By Elizabeth Parman A few years ago I was scrolling social media when a post from a friend caught my eye. Bees Attend Keeper’s Funeral read the newspaper clipping from the June 4, 1956 Danville Bee. The article went on to explain that a beekeeper from the Berkshire mountains, John Zepka, was buried in a […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Christine Stringer
Charity Trickett is Not So Glamorous Bridget Jones fans will fall hard for this based-on-a-true-story, behind-the-scenes tale of a young woman’s calamitous adventures trying to break into the movie industry in 1990s Hollywood. Hollywood, 1997. When Charity Trickett moves to LA to assist the director of the biggest blockbuster film of the year, she quickly […]
Searching for Home Between Laughs, Deadlines, and the 1 Train
By Sara Hamdan I didn’t set out to write a novel. Not at the start. My first piece for The New York Times was about the rise of stand-up comedy in the Middle East. I was on assignment in Dubai, wearing my journalist hat—sleuthing out the funniest voices across the region, asking serious questions like, […]
Stories, and the Unexpected Garden Path
By Juliet Greenwood The book I’m working on at the moment is based around a garden. That’s not surprising, as most of my stories involve gardens in one way or another – after all, my first published novel is called Eden’s Garden, and you can’t get more garden than that! Until this year, I wasn’t […]
A Note from Jill Tingley, Star of JILL IS NOT HAPPY
A Note from Jill Tingley, Star of JILL IS NOT HAPPY Dear Fellow Women (and I use that term loosely for some of you), Since you’re all so fascinated with women’s stories, you simply must read JILL IS NOT HAPPY —if only to learn how a real woman handles the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and […]
The Importance of a Solid Setting
By Judith Keim One of the first questions a reader has when she opens a book is Who? What? Where? In women’s fiction, the author must introduce the hero or heroine to the reader, identify a location, and give the reader an idea of what it is the heroine or hero wants. That then sets […]
Should I Edit an Anthology?
By Cindy Eastman As a writer, I often look for and submit to anthologies as a way to get my work out there and add a publishing credit to my portfolio. It was probably only natural, then, for the idea to create and edit my own anthology to form. Here’s my advice for those mulling […]
The Inspiration For The Very Best Of Care
The Very Best of Care started as a tiny seed of a thought twenty years ago. I was working as a nurse practitioner in a forty-bed neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The 1990’s were years of higher than usual birth rates, including preterm births. Often, our forty-bed unit would swell to accommodate closer to fifty, […]
The Lost Book of First Loves, by RaeAnne Thayne: EXCERPT
THE LOST BOOK OF FIRST LOVES From New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne comes a brand-new story about two women, a family secret and a lost manuscript that changes everything… Raised by her literary icon father Carson Wells, Alison Wells always felt loved, even though her mother died when she was a teen. But when she […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Terri Lewis
Today I’ll be interviewing Maurelle, a spying maid who snuck into my debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight, when I wasn’t looking. The story tells of Isabelle, King John’s second wife. A romantic headstrong girl who caught King John’s eye. He married her, took her to England, and made her queen where she grew […]
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