Tag: featured
When to Keep Secrets and When to Tell Truths
Good fiction starts with a good story. Good historical fiction adds a well researched and articulated sense of time and place. Good historical fiction based on a well-documented era in one’s own family provides an author the rare opportunity to bring a loved one’s legacy to the future. Writing my recently released novel, Even in […]
How To Write a Nonfiction Proposal
We’ve all been there – you’ve been secretly scribbling away, researching, collecting interesting sources or articles, and googling like mad. Finally, one day you think, “Could I take my secret project and turn it into a real book? Would anyone want to publish it, or even read it?” In my particular case, I had yet […]
Emily Dickinson – Breathing Life into a Legacy
“She was not daily-bread. She was star-dust.” Martha Dickinson Bianchi on Emily Dickinson The Belle of Amherst’s poetry lives on. It’s been almost 130 years since Emily Dickinson’s death, and yet her works are as popular as ever, with over 1,600 scholarly articles published about her poetry in the last 25 years. Yet whilst her […]
Female Friendships in Literature
Men have dominated the friendship scene in books throughout literary history. Pip and Herbert, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Frodo and Sam, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, Romeo and Mercutio. The list goes on and on. Straight forward, no nonsense bromance at its best. Delve into the archives for a history of female friendships however, […]
Top 10 Tips for Aspiring Authors
I don’t proclaim to be a best-selling author or a writing expert. I don’t have a hundred books or ten years of being published under my belt. I have only been published for eighteen months (though in that time I have had three short stories, five novellas and two full length novels released – so […]
Life Is A Boat
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. What stopped me will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been there: kids, relationships, work, life. During my twenties and thirties we’d travelled sporadically as a family, and moving around always seemed to unlock the words. I’d come back from each trip with a notebook full of jottings […]
The Novelistas – A Great Group of Writing Friends
The NW Novelistas (also known as Novelistas Ink) are a group of friends, who also happen to be writers, and meet each month for lunch, writerly gossip and mutual support. The group was founded over fifteen years ago by Sunday Times bestselling author Trisha Ashley, and as you can see from our latest books , […]
The Connection With Readers
When my debut novel was published, the component of the writing life furthest from my mind was arguably the most obvious. Readers. It wasn’t as if the novel was the first time my work that had made it into print. As a freelance journalist, I’d seen my byline for years, but the satisfaction it engendered […]
Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life
I was a Hasidic woman, from age fifteen to forty-five. You’ve seen them, the Jewish ultra-orthodox, the men in beards and hats and black clothes, the women in long modest covered, even covering their hair. I had an arranged marriage to a Hasidic man while still a teen and bore seven children, birth control forbidden. […]
How To Handle Rejection: Six Tips
The lives of creative people fascinate me. As far back as I can recall, I have devoured biographies and interviews with performing artists—singers, actors, dancers, even famous models. Often I read how some celebrated actress has faced repeated rejections, only to triumph finally with a huge hit—the breakthrough role that made her career. I learned […]
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