Tag: featured
On Revision: Reframing the House, Painting, and Applying the Finishing Touches
by Jill Caugherty Over ten years ago, in 2008, I began writing my historical novel, WALTZ IN SWING TIME. I had no firm plans other than to base the story loosely on my grandmother’s life and learn from my mistakes with an earlier shelved autobiographical manuscript. Little did I realize that the novel would morph […]
Kat Gordon: On Writing
When I first read about Alice de Janzé I was looking for a way into my novel. I’d recently come back from travelling and working in East Africa, and I knew I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about a sun that grew so hot that we’d rise at 5am to start […]
Life Disrupted: A Source Of Creation
A month ago we moved. We left a community where we’d been deeply rooted for the last thirty years. We left wide skies and open fields of the high shrub steppe for a forested island near Seattle. The move brings us closer to family, to grandkids, to big city opportunities, but wrenches me from the […]
Writing My Debut
I raised a glass, looked across the table at my mum and plastered the smile on my face; trying not to stare or show my heartbreak at the yellow paper Christmas cracker hat sitting too low on her thin hair, or the collar bones that jutted above her black sparkly cardigan. ‘Happy Christmas.’ I clinked […]
A Gift For You — Holidays For Writers
Where are you in your writing life? Looking for a good idea? Slogging through that first draft? In the glory of revisions? Here’s the gift. You have already gotten the holiday present you always wanted. Remember when that idea came to you? The seductive, encircling beginning of the possibility that you, just like you always […]
High Expectations Kept Me From Seeing My Success
“When did you first consider yourself a writer?” The question came from a writing coach facilitating an online group class. After considering this, the answer was fuzzy. “Two…maybe three years, after I published my book?” The teacher’s eyes widened as the rest of the class looked on, each face staring out from individual video squares […]
On Finding The Right Writing Advice
In his poem ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’, Dylan Thomas tells of his writing being ‘Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages / And the lovers lie abed.’ It’s a seemingly perfect image – a writer, scribbling away at a desk set before a window, his ink drying under a […]
Interview with Kathy Pooler
Kathy Pooler’s compelling new memoir Just the Way He Walked: A Mother’s Story of Healing and Hope profiles two addicts: her son Brian and herself. She thinks she can “fix” her son with love, money and support. She doesn’t realize how she enables him to drink more. Days and nights go by and she has […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Katie Golding and Billy King
Contemporary Romance author Katie Golding interviews Billy King, a cowboy-motorcycle racer returned home for the holidays in her upcoming debut FEARLESS; the first novel in her Moto Grand Prix series. KG: Hi Billy! Thanks for finding the time to talk to me today. BK: Yes, ma’am. Always happy to lend a moment when need be. […]
Why Women Read Fiction
Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives By Helen Taylor Copyright Over several decades, I’ve been fascinated by the importance women attach to reading fiction, and how eager they are to discuss it. In the 1980s, I began to research a scholarly book about that classic bestseller Gone With the Wind, and was astonished how many […]
Recent Comments