Tag: featured
How Ghosts, Activism and a Psychic Saved My Writing: Reflections on keeping the faith
Like so many authors with full-time day jobs, my writing time was limited, rigorously scheduled and precious. I wrote in the spare moments my busy psychotherapy practice allowed me. And then I had an opportunity to take a three-month sabbatical. Just before the break, I had arranged for a few people to read a draft […]
The Complexity of Relationships
Relationships are complicated things, in both fiction and real life. I usually write romance novels, where the heroine meets a hunky male, they’re both attracted to each other but there is some conflict that keeps them apart, until finally the conflict is resolved and they profess their love for each other and often get married. […]
10 Avoidable Mistakes When Writing Your First Book
I have completed five books now (four have been published, the other should be out next year) and every single time I have made avoidable mistakes. Each time I start a new book, I remember the mistakes of the previous book and vow not to make those. Then I make other ones instead. One of […]
The Joy of Infusing Fiction with Heart and Heritage by Tori Eldridge
As fiction writers, we spend a tremendous amount of time living in a make-believe world of our own construction. When we’re not doing that, we’re often lost in addictive research on topics that are incredibly fascinating, at least to us. It’s a wonderful way to live, and we’re fortunate to have this creative expression in […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Donna Miscolta
Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories Set in California in the 1960s and ’70s, Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories takes Angie year by thorny year from kindergarten through high school, offering an often humorous, sometimes biting, but always compassionate portrait of the artist as a shy, awkward Mexican-American girl. Taking place against the backdrop of the Cold War […]
Sparring the Pandemic
When the bell rang, I tore loose the black Velcro straps with my teeth and pulled off my yellow leather boxing gloves. Quickly I unstrapped my padded helmet and tilted it back on my head. I wanted more air on me. Sweat streamed down my face and neck; my breath came hard and I grit […]
Priming the Writing Pump: Dolls as My Muse
On days the words didn’t flow, I made dolls. It wasn’t an escape; it was my method of priming the pump to access messages that were trying to come through. It was a way to step easily into creative flow, an act of physically manifesting my muse. I had devoted seven years to a rich […]
LISTENING WITH COURAGE: HOW I NAVIGATE BETWEEN MIDDLE-GRADE, YA, AND ADULT WRITING
By Heather Mateus Sappenfield I write a story listening carefully to how it needs to be told, regardless of genre. Its narrator usually ushers a tale from what seems the back to the front of my noggin, and it tends—unlike most folks—to arrive in near entirety, with all the big movements in place. The details […]
Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter: Excerpt
FAMILY IN SIX TONES is a dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter–exploring their complicated relationship and touching on war and past tragedy, culture clash and bullying, and growing up both as individuals and as a family. We are delighted to feature this excerpt. From FAMILY IN SIX […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Daniella Bernett Interviews Emmeline Kirby and Gregory Longdon
OLD SINS NEVER DIE Never look back…Treason is deadly While in the Lake District, journalist Emmeline Kirby and jewel thief/insurance investigator Gregory Longdon overhear a man attempting to hire international assassin Hugh Carstairs, a MI5 agent who went rogue. They race back to London to warn Philip Acheson of the Foreign Office and Superintendent Oliver […]
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