Tag: featured
From Facebook Posts and Grocery Lists to Book
What does a Facebook-posting, grocery-list-writing mom of seven do when a story pops into her head—for the first time in her life? She writes it down. And when the next story pops into her head, she writes that one down, too. The next thing she knows, she’s on a journey to publishing her first book. […]
Will The Real Kinsey Millhone Please Stand Up? –How a Private Investigator Became a Writer
Those of you who are mystery lovers will need no explanation with regard to the title of this piece: Kinsey Millhone is a fictional private investigator who stars in 25 novels penned by the late great Sue Grafton, spanning 36 years and the alphabet from A to Y. I was already a state of California […]
Retirement and Writing
The thought of retirement is an anxious and exciting proposition. The end of a career can leave us wondering who we are and who we will become without our job description. Visions of unscheduled and endless expanses of time offer contradictory images of boredom and fulfillment. What will we do to fill the hours that […]
The Unexpected Writing Prompt that Began My Career
I never wanted to be a writer much less an author. Two negative experiences in the classroom convinced me I did not have that talent. In high school, an English teacher I greatly admired reviewed a poem I’d written about the death of my beloved dog. She told me the poem was “maudlin,” a term […]
Jumpstart Your Writing
There are some writers who don’t actually believe in writer’s block. Or maybe they call it other names like “procrastination” or “writers’ stall.” But as both a writer of sixteen novels and a clinical psychologist, I know it lurks in the minds of most of us. I’d like to offer a few suggestions for moving […]
Take Up Some Room, and Other Public Speaking Tips for Women Writers
Public speaking is a part of every author’s platform for promoting books. I’m always cautious about painting any group with the broad brush—most especially when it comes to culture or gender. Still, one pattern has stared me in the face across the decades of coaching hundreds of public speaking students. In greater numbers than their […]
THE ONE-EYED QUEEN: Inspo and Sanity
What inspires me to write is that I’ll go insane if I don’t. It’s very motivating. My first recollection of using it as a coping mechanism, I’m not sure how old I was. Four, maybe five, unable to sleep because I was certain there was a tangle of snakes under my bed. I crept to […]
On Writing: Ausma Zehanat Khan
Crime fiction has no shortage of gutsy, brilliant and intriguingly flawed heroines, so when I set about writing my own mystery series, I knew I wanted one of my detectives to embody those same qualities. Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty are partners who work at Community Policing, a unit that investigates crimes that impact minority […]
Diane Jeffrey on A Sense Of Place
We’ve all read novels where the setting stays with us as much as the characters once we’ve finished reading the last page. The London depicted in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the wild Yorkshire moors in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Middle-earth in JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings books; C.S. Lewis’s Narnia… In many novels, […]
Writing Process, Routine, and Craft
Writing is craft as much as it is art. Without the strong support of a good practice, it is very hard to create good work – at least, this is what I have found with my writing. Without a strong routine, my work is haphazard and frustrating and I fall into all the bad habits, […]
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