Tag: featured
The Healing Power of Writing
As a holistic health practitioner, I use a wide variety of healing modalities in my private practice. One of the most effective therapies is therapeutic writing. When integrated as adjunctive therapy in an overall treatment plan, it can serve to promote psychological healing. Most of us write alone. It’s a solitary experience. But in the […]
Once an Immigrant, Always an immigrant!
Clasping a big folder with every document that could prove our existence, my parents and I stood at San Francisco airport waiting for our turn. The words, “Welcome to the United States of America,” dazzled above the immigration officer. It seemed like hours had passed since we got off our flight from India. The lines […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Patricia Harman
Patricia Harman spent over thirty years caring for women as a midwife, first as a lay-midwife, delivering babies in cabins and on communal farms in West Virginia, and later as a nurse-midwife in teaching hospitals and in a community hospital birthing center. Though she loved caring for women and infants, she recently retired to write […]
How To Sell Books: My Marketing Journey
I thought my romcom writing career would last forever. I didn’t make much money on my first book, She Sins at Midnight, during its debut year. But I knew going in that would probably be the case. Sales wouldn’t go gangbusters until my second book, The Reinvention of Mimi Finnegan. Which is exactly what happened. […]
Silence, Mostly, And A Trickling Of Form Rejections
There were nine children sitting down to eat at our table that day. Six of them were moaning: I don’t like broccoli; I don’t like potatoes; I don’t like quiche. One of the babies picked up a carrot and squeezed it so that lumps of the orange vegetable fell all over the high chair and […]
Book Coaching from both a Book Coach and a Client
One of my roles in the writing world is serving as a book coach for Author Accelerator, a company created by book coach extraordinaire, Jennie Nash. I’m also a client. I work with a book coach on my own novels. When I talk to people about book coaching, the most frequent question I get asked […]
Ellen’s Advice for Authors: Twelve Important Rules of English that Shouldn’t be Forgotten
Ellen’s Advice for Authors: Twelve Important Rules of English that Shouldn’t be Forgotten With thanks to creator Frank L. Visco If you ask me, there are never enough rules to follow when writing. Frankly, a dozen of them barely scratch the surface. If I had my way, a yearly reading of Strunk and White’s The […]
What Lurks Behind Your Identity As A Writer?
On the surface, our identity as writers is straightforward, isn’t it? A writer is someone who writes, and we write from a burning desire to express ourselves, or a sense that we’re incomplete if we don’t. When the biggest challenge most writers face is claiming a space for that passion amid myriad competing demands and […]
When My Cat Died and Came Back to Life, I Did What Any Writer Would Do
Recently, Senator Tammy Duckworth mentioned her “Alive Day” anniversary on Twitter. She said, “Today is my Alive Day, the anniversary of the day I almost died but didn’t.” She went on to describe how 14 years earlier, an RPG hit the helicopter she was piloting in Iraq. She lost both of her legs. But instead of […]
The Shame Of Losing
My first book is a memoir called The Shame of Losing. I didn’t mean for it to be a memoir; in fact, I tried in my writing program to make it a movie script, then a collection of short stories. It was my mentor, a memoirist, who called me out, saying that this was my […]
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