Tag: featured
Lena Manta and Her World of Storytelling
It was 2007 when my fourth novel, The House by the River, was published. No one, not even I, could have imagined how many thousands of readers this meandering river would touch, how many people it would wash away in its path, how many would come to love it and hold it so close in […]
Sex and Horror in Gothic fiction
A good ‘scare’ is a wonderful aphrodisiac. Horror prickles our skin, and works icy fingers through our blood. It demands a visceral reaction. How delicious is the sensation of fear: an echo of carnal delight. It’s hard to say where pain ends and pleasure begins in Gothic fiction, in those dangerous undercurrents, on the razor […]
Reinventing the Classics: Shakespeare Now!
The historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that large numbers of strangers only co-operate by a belief in common myths perpetuated in our folk stories and accepted by our religions. These infiltrate into literature and with time, become our guidelines. Though the worlds they describe might be different, they provide a torch for solving present day […]
Writing the Book You Want to Write – Without Barriers
You have had one of your brilliant ideas for a novel. It is shaking you by the tail and won’t let go. You’re excited, energised. ‘But is it commercial?’ you ask yourself. ‘Is it what agents and editors are looking for at the moment? Can you imagine the marketing? There are plenty of soul-searching questions […]
Rethinking Structure
In the light of the recent sexual misconduct cases, I have been questioning again the way that we tell story. The hero’s journey, taught on so many creative writing MFAs the world over, is still our go to method for structuring our story. It is either an inward journey or an outward one. We walk […]
Writing And Bad Habits
My Twitter biography reads “seriously trying to avoid caffeine and adverbs; succeeding in neither”. Over the years I’ve tried most tactics to motivate and fuel myself to write. Back in 2005, when I was writing the first draft of what became my coming-of-age novel What a Way to Go, I went on a one-week writing […]
And Still I Write
In the early spring of 2013, my husband and I left our careers in Seattle to move to a remote peninsula in the northwest reaches of the state. It’s the place where we’d intended to retire someday, but we had another twenty years of work ahead of us. After crisscrossing the country and oceans to […]
From Rejection To Seventeen Book Contracts
When people ask me when I first became a writer, the most honest answer is, “Three-years-old.” When they ask me when I first became a professional novelist, the most honest answer is, “Three years ago.” Why so much space in-between? When I was three, I used to dictate stories to my parents, because I had […]
Q&A with Laura Bradford, Literary Agent
The Bradford Literary Agency is a boutique agency which offers a full range of representation services to authors who are both published and pre-published. Our mission at the Bradford Literary Agency is to form true partnerships with our clients and build long-term relationships that extend from writing the first draft through the length of the […]
Engineers, Authors, and Assassins – Thriving in a Nontraditional Field
Men have accomplished most “firsts” in history, but there are some notable exceptions. A woman invented Kevlar. A woman discovered pulsars. A woman wrote the first computer program. More surprisingly, the world’s first serial killer belonged to the more “fragile” and “demure” gender. I first came across that fact last fall: the world’s first serial […]
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