Tag: featured
On Writing Mrs. McPhealy’s American
by Claire R.McDougall “Every village has its idiot. Locharbert in Scotland had three.” This is the opening line of my novel “Mrs. McPhealy’s American,” and I think in those couple of lines the tenor of the book is set. I grew up in Scotland in a wee town like Locharbert, and then, like Steinbeck did […]
Telling the Bees: How a Social Media Post, an Ancient Tradition, and Magical Realism Inspired My New Novel, Bees in June
By Elizabeth Parman A few years ago I was scrolling social media when a post from a friend caught my eye. Bees Attend Keeper’s Funeral read the newspaper clipping from the June 4, 1956 Danville Bee. The article went on to explain that a beekeeper from the Berkshire mountains, John Zepka, was buried in a […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Christine Stringer
Charity Trickett is Not So Glamorous Bridget Jones fans will fall hard for this based-on-a-true-story, behind-the-scenes tale of a young woman’s calamitous adventures trying to break into the movie industry in 1990s Hollywood. Hollywood, 1997. When Charity Trickett moves to LA to assist the director of the biggest blockbuster film of the year, she quickly […]
The English Masterpiece, by Katherine Reay: Excerpt
The English Masterpiece “Art . . . London . . . Seventies Glam . . . Yesss, please. The English Masterpiece by Katherine Reay has ALL the goodies–especially for historical fiction lovers and art aficionados . . . Buckle your seatbelt as all hell breaks loose.” –Lisa Barr, New York Times bestselling author of The Goddess of Warsaw Set in […]
Searching for Home Between Laughs, Deadlines, and the 1 Train
By Sara Hamdan I didn’t set out to write a novel. Not at the start. My first piece for The New York Times was about the rise of stand-up comedy in the Middle East. I was on assignment in Dubai, wearing my journalist hat—sleuthing out the funniest voices across the region, asking serious questions like, […]
Snark Comes to Spark by Ellen Notbohm
As I wake this morning after another night of badly broken sleep, I see my pencils sitting there on the nightstand in the half-light, their points dulled from the last time I used them. Which was—when? My weary thought is, I can’t write this morning. My pencils are dull. My pencils are pointless, literally and figuratively. […]
Writing Through the Wreckage: How I Turned My Trauma Into a Memoir That Set Me Free
By Brooke Deanne, Author of Shattered, Broken & Beautiful I never set out to write a memoir. I set out to survive. To simply make sense of the shattered, and broken pieces of my life. To piece myself back together after years of religious oppression, narcissistic abuse, childhood trauma, and deeply buried sexual abuse that […]
Stories, and the Unexpected Garden Path
By Juliet Greenwood The book I’m working on at the moment is based around a garden. That’s not surprising, as most of my stories involve gardens in one way or another – after all, my first published novel is called Eden’s Garden, and you can’t get more garden than that! Until this year, I wasn’t […]
A Note from Jill Tingley, Star of JILL IS NOT HAPPY
A Note from Jill Tingley, Star of JILL IS NOT HAPPY Dear Fellow Women (and I use that term loosely for some of you), Since you’re all so fascinated with women’s stories, you simply must read JILL IS NOT HAPPY —if only to learn how a real woman handles the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and […]
Try it, You Might Like it: 5 Reasons to Write Micro Fiction
A micro fiction challenge might be the most fun you can have while improving your writing If you’d told me a few years ago that a micro fiction challenge would change my mind about writing super short stories, I probably would have scoffed. Because writing short is hard (and writing short and well is even […]
Recent Comments