Tag: featured
Resistance in Nazi Germany and the Power of Inspiration
Inspiration. I spent years looking for inspiration. I often imagined inspiration would find me on a sunny day, under a leafy tree with a book in hand and a butterfly on my knee. Clarity would strike, and like something out of a movie, I’d be inspired to create something beautiful and lasting—something with my hands […]
Why We Need Contemporary War Fiction Written by Women
At some stage during my adult life, and this will astound my history teacher if she’d discover, I found myself fascinated by the thought of writing fiction inspired by contemporary events. A thread that brought me here might have been reading Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” in my teens; another one, witnessing the terrorist […]
The Importance of Genre By Christina Hoag
One of those writing clichés tells aspiring authors to “write the book you want to read.” That may be true, but make sure your book fits into an accepted genre or no one else will read it. As I was writing my noir crime novel Skin of Tattoos, I never gave a thought as to what […]
Professional Envy
We’ve all experienced professional envy at least once in our lives. When a colleague gets a pay rise and you don’t; when you’re skipped over for a promotion; when one person on your team always seems to hit their targets. But why do we never talk about professional envy between authors? While I’m sure we’d […]
My Debut Journey
My journey is similar to other debut journeys, but it’s also completely unique. I come from science, and I’ve always had a passion for writing. When I was in fourth grade, I wrote my first book. It was a story about keeping those who had left us in our hearts, and the title was Every […]
The Art Of Being Enough
The Art of Being Enough It was mid-summer. As I sat in my quiet office and edited my manuscript, the dilemmas had increased instead of decreased. I shifted passages from past tense to past perfect. I changed lacked to lost when referring to my mother’s breast. I questioned if anyone cared whether I was eight […]
Bowing To Elephants: Evolution
BOWING TO ELEPHANTS is a travel memoir with a twist. An unloved rich girl from San Francisco becomes a travel junkie to escape a dysfunctional family and a narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Thanks to a journey of healing and self-discovery, the author navigates depression, loneliness, and loss while learning how to break down the false barriers […]
Why We Love the Magic So Much: Women’s Fiction and the Supernatural By Rachel Dacus
What makes some of us crave women’s fiction that has elements of magic? In my case, it all started with the Oz books. At a formative age, I learned to identify with a kickass heroine like Dorothy, who made her way through mystifying, dangerous magical lands. I also identified with the magical female denizens of […]
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: How Innovative Use of Language Can Serve to Discover New Ways of Communicating Difficult Topics
By Sadie Hoagland In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Gabriel García Márquez referenced his work as the literary expression of an “outsized reality… a reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths.” He was referring to, and listed in his speech, the many atrocities, […]
Monsters
Monsters. We have always been fascinated by them: either to gather macabre evidence to prove their existence, or otherwise to emphatically disprove it. They can be fantastical, supernatural, or far too close to home – monsters who hide in plain sight, who remind us that humanity can often be a thinly-veiled concept. As a sixth-form […]
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