Category: On Writing
Writer’s Block? Make Room for Beauty
My wildflower garden is audaciously misbehaved—thick and tall with noble yarrow and coreopsis where the sun shines brightest, slight with purple cornflower, blue flax, and red-pink Sweet William beneath the ledge of tree shade. Nothing uniform in this arrangement. The tallest flowers fall down. The rabbits sip at leggy stems as if they’re straws. The […]
BROKEN BAYOU by Jennifer Moorhead, EXCERPT
BROKEN BAYOU In this debut thriller, a troubled child psychologist returns to a small Louisiana town to protect her secrets but winds up having to protect her life. Dr. Willa Watters is a prominent child psychologist at the height of her career. But when a viral video of a disastrous television interview puts her reputation […]
Bringing My Heart Manuscript into the World
As an adult writer, my dream ambition was to write a multicultural romance between an English girl and an Iranian, because of my own personal connection to the story. But rather than having my fictitious couple settling in England, I wanted to have the majority of the story based in 1950s Iran. The idea was […]
Plot or Bust in 5 Easy Steps
by New York Times Bestselling author Marina Adair The feud between plotters and pantsers in the writing world is as old as that of the Hatfields and McCoys. I fall squarely on the side of the plotters, driven by the beauty between the spontaneity and creativity that falls within the framework of a structured story. […]
The Process of Writing My Memoir, by Penny Lane
I knew being a voracious lifelong reader did not necessarily make me a good writer. When I read the gorgeous prose of Arundhati Roy in “The God of Small Things,” I said to myself I can never write like that. My career had taught me to write short, concise, and to the point, but nothing […]
On Writing Below Luck Level by Barbara Erasmus
Hannah wants her terminally-ill mother to die like a dog. Like a beloved, cherished dog, stroked, gentle-handed, by a loving owner, beside a qualified professional who’ll inject a measured dose to make the ending less traumatic. Fortunately for me, Below Luck Level, my novel about early-Alzheimer’s and assisted suicide, is fiction. Authors of non-fiction books […]
FACT, FICTION OR A FUSION
By Cathleen Watkins It would be difficult to write convincingly about performing a complex surgery or piloting a plane if you’ve never done these things. This is why aspiring writers are told, “Write what you know. Draw from what’s familiar.” Like most writers, I can find aspects of my daily life to write about. For […]
From the Subterranean Murmurs of her Sister Soul
Gemma June Howell’s debut novel The Crazy Truth is a hybrid poetry novel following the story of valleys poet, Girlo Wolf. Set in post-industrial Britain, spanning four decades, this novel follows Girlo’s journey as she battles with mental health and childhood trauma. Through her experiences and those of her working-class community, Girlo discovers that her […]
Family Declassified: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Journey from Spy to Children’s Book Author
by Katherine Fennelly I didn’t learn that my grandfather had been a spy or that I was Jewish until I was an adult. These discoveries motivated me to conduct several years of research that uncovered a web of family secrets. My grandfather’s name was Francis Kalnay, but we all called him “Ferko”. When I was […]
Where are the Female Fictional Characters with ADHD?
By Lisa Timoney Whilst my eldest daughter was undergoing a diagnosis for ADHD, I embarked on a massive learning curve, absorbing as much information about the condition as I could. The truth about how ADHD presents in women was entirely new to me. I thought behavioural issues and hyperactivity were defining factors, but my daughter […]
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