Tag: featured
On Writing WHITE by Aviva Rubin
My debut novel WHITE has been a long time coming. I’ve been working on it for well over a decade. The story bush-wacked its way across the country, creating then killing off characters, plot lines, scenes and locations. I’m so grateful I’ll only write a first novel once. All that executing and traipsing about is […]
Seasoned Romance Empowers us All
A decade ago my friends and I started a monthly gathering called “Dirty Old Women.” There we were, in our fifties and sixties, reading our sexy stories to a packed audience in a California bookstore. Women in their thirties would thank us afterwards because everywhere else they went, the message they heard was romance and […]
What Hallmark Taught Me by Mary Flynn
By Mary Flynn On the very first day that I “cared enough to send the very best,” I sat down with the Editorial Director of Hallmark Cards in Kansas City. I admit I felt intimidated. As someone who routinely wrote book reviews for The New York Times, Web Schott was the most serious and erudite […]
WHEN A QUAINT GEORGIA TOWN REFUSED TO BURY ITS GHOSTS, I DID TOO
By Jan Heidrich-Rice The ghosts came to town in 2020. October, to be exact. That’s when I contemplated taking a stab at my first National Novel Writers Month (NANOWRIMO), the challenge to draft a 50,000-word book in the month of November. The experience resulted in the first whispers of SECRETS OF THE BLUE MOON. My […]
The Whisper Sister by Jennifer S. Brown: Excerpt
The author of Modern Girls delivers an atmospheric coming-of-age story set in Prohibition-era New York, tracing one immigrant family’s fortunes and a young girl’s journey from the schoolyard to the speakeasy. The streets of New York in 1920 are most certainly not paved with gold, as Minnie Soffer learns when she arrives at Ellis Island. Her father, […]
To Plan or Not to Plan?
By Julie Hartley A dream came true for me in November 2024 when, after several months of editorial meetings and the submission of three detailed synopses, I received a two-book deal from Bookouture UK. Beyond excited, I clicked on the contract, scanned the deadlines specified for delivery of the first book, and my jaw dropped […]
Lessons I Learned in a Comedy Club
One Wednesday evening in 2008, I sat at a table in the back of Go Bananas Comedy club in Cincinnati, Ohio. I took notes as people in the room made suggestions to a young guy in a backwards hat on how to make his joke work better. “What if instead of saying you chugged a […]
Echoes of the Heart: Finding Voice in the Void
By Gwen Suesse (Notes from Planet Widow: Finding My Way After Loss) Memoir: I enjoy reading a good one, but write one? Moi? The very thought is unsettling at best and, in the dark of night, downright terrifying. Why would anyone want to read my story? And yet, that’s what my latest book, Planet Widow: […]
The Inspiration for my Book: A Song, Chekhov’s Gun, and Heroes
By I.M. Aiken The wisdom at our dining table involved “write what you know.” What does a kid know? My answer was: join the volunteer fire department, earn your EMT, work in the inner city on urban ambulances, sail the oceans on long voyages, work as a cook, teach skiing professionally, move to Alaska, spend […]
The Paris Understudy by Aurelie Thiele, Excerpt
The Paris Understudy This powerful debut novel brings to life the hard choices Parisians made–or failed to make–under Nazi occupation, in the tradition of Pam Jenoff and Fiona Davis. 1938. Paris Opera legend Madeleine Moreau must keep newcomer Yvonne Chevallier, whose talent she fears, off the stage. As the long-standing star of the opera, she is […]
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