Tag: featured
PEOPLE RUIN EVERYTHING
As a child, I wanted become a writer. I had no idea what I would write about, but the idea of putting part of me onto a page that would last forever was heady. I got older and read like mad. Lots of novels, a few story collections, almost no poetry or non-fiction. When I […]
It’s Not the Witches. It’s Us By Kimberly Belle
A couple Halloweens ago, Vanessa Lillie, Cate Holahan and I stood in a graveyard in Salem, Massachusetts, debating how exactly four young, rich widows in heels and pencil skirts could break into an ancient crypt without getting caught. This was after we’d bumped into Sasquatch strolling down the street with a plastic pumpkin bucket and […]
How ILLEGITIMATE Took Seven Revisions and Ten Years to get Published by Maddie Lock
I didn’t start out to write a memoir. It was in a small café in Bavaria that my German aunt lifted a glass of wine to her lips and casually stated that she had found her father; that our grandfather, who we thought was her father was not. She was, in fact, a child created […]
Let Your Main Character Change You—It’s a Relationship, After All by Lee Upton
Recently I asked another novelist how she characterizes her relationship with her main character. Without hesitation she said, “It’s a passionate love affair.” That sounds exciting—and fabulous. Our connection with a main character might be volatile, obsessive, teeming with unexpected swerves, even fraught with the possibility of abandonment if the novel fails. To write a […]
Judy Foreman: On Writing The Scallop Plot
I’ve been writing my whole life — my high school newspaper, my college paper, many, many wonderful years as the Boston Globe health columnist and science writer, and most recently, as a novice writer of thrillers. And I can tell you, writing fiction, mysteries no less, after all these years of telling the truth, of […]
From Journaling to a Novel by Lorelei Brush
The Boy With the Butterfly Mind started out with journaling in the late 1990’s. I was married to a man with ADHD, raising a child with ADHD, and working a demanding job in international development. My life felt like chaos much of the time. Traveling internationally was actually the part of life that kept me […]
On Writing Betting the Farm – How a Maverick Entrepreneur and a Band of Scientists Changed Agriculture Forever
“Betting the Farm – How a Maverick Entrepreneur and a Band of Scientists Changed Agriculture Forever” chronicles the story of Agrigenetics, a company that pioneered technology to create better plants using gene technologies. It was the early 1980s. The authors Janice Kimpel and Adrienne Clarke are scientists and were both involved in the company, Adrienne […]
You Are the Heroine You’ve Been Waiting For by Dale M. Kushner
I’m sitting at my desk in writing studio, my golden retriever, Maisie, curled at my feet. Outside, summer sunlight sifts through the leaves. A new wren family has moved into the birdhouse, the mother wren in a flurry of departures and returns, food for her nestlings in her beak. She reminds me of the helper […]
How Finding Grace Found me by Fiorella Ruas
“She went out to buy wine. She didn’t mean to disappear.” That single sentence sums up the question that had been preoccupying me for years. Why do so many women reach a point where they wonder how they became strangers in their own lives? The answer, for me, didn’t arrive all at once but in […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Susan Coll
Word Salad Matilda loves logic and order, and now her structured world is falling apart—in a bookstore, of all places. Former economics major Matilda is living where she never thought she would—back in her hometown of Washington D.C.—at a job she never imagined she’d take—at her neighborhood bookstore. She’s coping with the recent loss of […]
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