Tag: featured
Excerpt from Water Mask: Interpreting Frozen Ground
In Water Mask, Devine skis woodland trails with her baby on her back, navigates sea ice with whalers and whirls two thousand feet above the tundra with a rookie bush pilot. She negotiates the death of her father, and the near loss of her family’s cabin on the Copper River. Reflections on family, place, memory, work, […]
Slaying The Sequel
My debut novel, Seeking Eden, gushed into the world like an overdue baby, its gestation barely two and a half years from writing the first line to publication. Words flew from the keys, tumbling over themselves in my haste to tell the story of a group of above-averagely dysfunctional misfits living in a suburban English […]
Writer or “Roadie”: Who Leads the Way – the Author or the Character?
Yes, I created a character in my image … but a way better version, and far more interesting. Sophie Bloom, the protagonist in my new novel, THE UNBREAKABLES, is a hot mess. Her marriage falls apart, her besties betray her, her 19-year-old daughter studying abroad is having an affair with her married professor, and she […]
Getting into the Zone
by Lynne Shelby There are days when the words flow so effortlessly from keyboard to WIP that it feels as though your characters have taken over your plot and are telling their stories for themselves, taking it in directions that you, the writer and supposedly their creator, would never have imagined. You are so deep […]
Why and How Two Strangers Wrote a BDSM Erotic Romance From Opposite Sides Of The Globe
As some of you may know, the online writing community can be one of the most supportive ones out there. Thanks to hashtags on social media, it’s easy to find your little posse of like-minded people. That’s how Amelia Foster and Deana Birch originally met, in a Twitter chat group of unpublished authors all struggling […]
From Novel to Memoir
I have always wanted to write novels. My very first novel was published by a company who specialised in short novels written for the older end of the reading market ie love but no sex, and were available only through libraries. I was delighted. My career had taken off. Not so, as we writers know. […]
Top 5 Things Pole Fitness Taught Me About Writing
Top 5 Things Pole Fitness Taught Me About Writing Several years ago, I realized an important truth about myself: if exercise is not something fun and interesting, I am never, ever going to do it. However, my tendonitis becomes harder to manage when I gain weight. I also harbor a deep, abiding love for junk […]
How Reviews Helped Strengthen My Future Novels
By Jennifer S. Alderson “What are your novels about?” I imagine this is the question writers are asked most often. I write mysteries and thrillers so until recently my standard reply was a quick description of the puzzle that must be solved and the quest my series’ main character must undergo to save those she […]
The Peripatetic Muse: Writing in Multiple Genres
My latest book is just aborning this spring, To the Bones, a satirical genre-fluid novel that draws on Appalachian tales, horror, and romance in its story of three interlocked mysteries in one small mountain town. It follows a poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse (Press 53, 2018) and precedes a work-in-progress, a haibun […]
10 Things Writing About a 1970s Commune Taught Me about World-Building
“Write what you know.” Every writer has heard this advice more times than we can count. My debut novel This I Know is steeped in my upbringing as a preacher’s daughter in the 1960s Midwest. I understood my characters because they were in my DNA. I was familiar with the rural West Michigan setting because […]
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