Tag: featured
Unusual Writing Tips
The first rule of writing tips, is there ARE NO RULES There is nothing more annoying for a writer than reading a list of rules that another writer has come up with and feeling if you don’t comply with them, that somehow you are failure. It is even more annoying when you try them and […]
The Importance of Obsession by Wendy Trimboli
Every few years I get on a reading kick about extreme mountaineering. The annual assault on Everest by climbers from around the world fills my Twitter feed each May, prompting me to cram more books with titles like Into the Silence and Dark Summit onto my already cluttered bookshelves. While I have zero interest in […]
A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books)
My father was sold by his mother to his aunt for £500. This shocking truth, which came to form the backbone of A Perfect Explanation, was something I’d known all my life. I don’t remember learning it – so casually was it known in the family that its existence was not something of drama. It […]
5 Reasons Why I Took the Series Writing Plunge
By Veronica Cline Barton, Author of My American Almost Royal Cousin Series #CozyMystery When I first started my writing career in late 2016, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was destined to create a cozy mystery series. It’s my favorite genre, and one where I feel a sense of lovely, deadly, […]
The Weather Here
My own internal and external storms increasingly seem to mirror the weather patterns of climate change. I started noticing this last year, just after turning 60. I closed my law practice, hoping, with my daughter several years out of college, I could turn my attention elsewhere, I could spend time listening to and answering my […]
Writing Without A Plan
I did not come to creative writing with a plan. I had moved between the worlds of books and design in past lives: as a book editor at several publishing houses in New York City and — after years of study at Parson’s School of Design — designing interiors in the New York metro area. […]
A TURING TEST FOR FICTION By Katherine Forbes Riley
When can a man write as a woman? A woman of another culture? A brutally raped woman? When is this acceptable and when does it fail a test society hasn’t explicitly defined, but we still see administered? Moreover, the test itself also changes, for we can all name certain memorable books that passed with flying […]
How I turned two things I loved into a Book
When I first started baking challah, it came out looking like pita. I was pregnant and we’d moved to Colorado Springs. I had to go to the library to look up high altitude baking (this was in the eighties) and while I was there, I picked up an old book on a display shelf. I […]
Yes, My Female Characters Have Sex
Yes, my female characters have sex.* *Good sex. And I no longer care if that bothers some people. By Amy Mason Doan My novel SUMMER HOURS was five months from publication when the “S word” first came up. It was on GoodReads, where an advance reader had put the book on a list: “Character You […]
Nuance vs. Propaganda
Most novels have a message of some kind, even it’s just “sometimes you have to break yourself out of a bad place to get to a better one.” We all want the stories we’re reading or watching to have some meaning. That’s why we started telling them to each other in the first place. But […]
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