Tag: featured
Look Away. You Don’t Want to See This.
He narrowed his eyes…with downcast eyes…her eyes darted to the window…she found him with her eyes…her eyes glistened with unshed tears…he blinked in surprise…she stared in amazement…he focused on the ground. Do you see the theme? These phrases are only a handful of the many I found in the rough draft of my work in […]
How My Probation Career Influenced My Writing
It’s always hard to know, isn’t it, which came first? The chicken or the egg. And that’s how I feel about my life as a crime writer, and my previous one as a probation officer. Let’s say my probation career was the chicken. I went into the job in my early twenties, burning with a […]
Writing Adventure Stories For Children
Writing for children, it has been said, is just like writing for adults, only much harder. So why would anyone attempt to write a novel for 8 – 12 year olds? I started by mistake. I’d loved the stories my Dad had told me, and being Irish, he spun some really good yarns. He had […]
How Writing a Book Taught Me the Pleasures of Cooking
For the first 27 years of my life I didn’t cook much. Once I got married, Søren, my husband, did most of the cooking at home. I could follow a recipe if I needed to, but I couldn’t just look in the fridge as my husband could and put a meal together. I was never […]
Finding Myself At A Writing Residency
It’s a warm day in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard where I am attending a two-week writing residency at Noepe Literary Arts Center. It’s an intelligent and generous group of writers and visual artists, and I am grateful to be around them in this creative space sharing disappointments and contentment. We share a bond that most people […]
5 Crime Fiction Blunders To Avoid
In addition to being an author, I am a big crime fiction, psychological thriller and mystery fan. Though I have always read this genre, I’ve spent the last year absolutely immersing myself in it, reading and reviewing everything I can. In addition, I’ve been discussing the genre with lots of other fans as part of […]
Historical fiction – Modern Themes
I like to think of my books as offering intelligent escapism. While I write about past times I try to do so in a way that people today can identify with – posing the kinds of dilemmas and problems, challenges and triumphs that are relevant today – even though the way we respond to them […]
The Baker’s Dozen—13 Lessons I Learned in the Kitchen that Made Me a Better Writer
I have been writing fiction for about seven years, but I have been baking twenty-three years, and almost everything I needed to know about writing I learned in the kitchen. Mise en Place— This is a French cooking term that means to put everything in its place. It’s the practice of measuring out all of […]
Writing From The Heart, Not For The Market
When I was in my early twenties, I started writing vignettes and short stories as a creative conduit for emotion, situations and affairs of the heart that I could not understand as I lived them in the moment. Writing them down helped me reflect on what I saw and allowed me to distance myself from […]
Learning as I Go
I can’t begin any discussion of what I’ve learned about writing while writing without a disclaimer: I’ve learned things that work for me. Aside from a few college-level writing courses, the books I’ve read on writing, and what I’ve picked up from other authors at workshops and conventions, I am completely self-taught. And I’m constantly […]
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