Tag: featured. women writers
On Rewriting Real-Life Tragedy: Part II
Write what you know. It’s every writer’s mantra, what we tell ourselves and each other. But what’s a suspense writer to do when she had an idyllic childhood? My father has never been arrested for murder. My husband has never disappeared without a trace. Up until recently, the parts of me that made it into […]
How I Embraced Vulnerability to Tell the Story of Becoming Starlight
Writing a book. To be quite honest, the thought had never entered my mind; I’d never written anything other than personal prose or patient charts that were never meant to see the light of day. The idea was so remote that it would’ve been, as in the Twilight Zone monologue, like “opening a door into […]
Musicals And Writing
When I agreed to write a piece for this fabulous website about how musical theater influences my writing, my first thought was: “How long am I allowed to ramble?” My second was: “How do musicals NOT influence my writing?” Full disclosure, though you can probably tell from the [Title of Show] reference in the title, […]
Where Characters Live
Like most authors, I use pictures as inspiration when I’m working on a story. I create a Pinterest board for each work in progress that helps ground me in the details of the story: setting for different scenes, objects that have significance to the characters, animals, etc. The one thing I stay away from though: […]
Inspiration Behind The Welcome Home Diner
If you’re the last person to leave Detroit, don’t forget to turn off the lights. This is the first sentence of my new release, THE WELCOME HOME DINER, and contemporary Detroit was the primary inspiration behind writing this book. There were other motivating factors—insight into the food business, personal intimacies—but I’ll get to those later. […]
Why I Put Dogs In My Fiction
Every time I attend a book club or read at a bookstore I am asked “Why do you include dogs in all of your books?” In fact, I didn’t include animals in my novels until my second book, ‘Lost & Found’ when a black Labrador with a heroic personality walked onto the stage of my […]
Q&A with Jardine Libaire
Jardine Libaire’s searing second novel WHITE FUR (Hogarth, May 2017), a postmodern Romeo and Juliet is charged with grit, lust, sex, fury, temptation, and desperation. (More below. The interviewer is chomping at the bit to spill it all here, but let’s get to some questions for Jardine first.) Jardine also collaborated on the book GRAVITY […]
Why Is It So Hard For ‘Strong’ Women To Ask For Help?
Asking for support, even when offering something in return, teaches you much, not least about yourself. Having been fiercely independent ever since flying the nest, having been diligent in every job from waitressing to building my own PR business (from unfunded scratch), nothing came harder than to ask others to help finance a venture about which […]
From Glossy Magazines To Novel
The seed for my novel Love Apples was sown during a summer creative writing course at Central Saint Martins in London. Although I’d been working as a food writer and sub-editor for women’s magazines for several years, I didn’t know where to begin with fiction; it’s one thing producing a 1000-word feature, another altogether growing […]
Does a ‘Not Good Enough’ Story Hold You Back in Life?
A ‘not good enough’ story is the one I learnt early on in life. I was 6 when I witnessed my mum’s slit wrists and two puddles of blood on the kitchen floor. She was ushered to the hospital and stitched up. News spread like fire in Azerbaijan, and later that day I found myself […]
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