Tag: women writers
From Novel to Memoir
I have always wanted to write novels. My very first novel was published by a company who specialised in short novels written for the older end of the reading market ie love but no sex, and were available only through libraries. I was delighted. My career had taken off. Not so, as we writers know. […]
Top 5 Things Pole Fitness Taught Me About Writing
Top 5 Things Pole Fitness Taught Me About Writing Several years ago, I realized an important truth about myself: if exercise is not something fun and interesting, I am never, ever going to do it. However, my tendonitis becomes harder to manage when I gain weight. I also harbor a deep, abiding love for junk […]
How Reviews Helped Strengthen My Future Novels
By Jennifer S. Alderson “What are your novels about?” I imagine this is the question writers are asked most often. I write mysteries and thrillers so until recently my standard reply was a quick description of the puzzle that must be solved and the quest my series’ main character must undergo to save those she […]
The Peripatetic Muse: Writing in Multiple Genres
My latest book is just aborning this spring, To the Bones, a satirical genre-fluid novel that draws on Appalachian tales, horror, and romance in its story of three interlocked mysteries in one small mountain town. It follows a poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse (Press 53, 2018) and precedes a work-in-progress, a haibun […]
10 Things Writing About a 1970s Commune Taught Me about World-Building
“Write what you know.” Every writer has heard this advice more times than we can count. My debut novel This I Know is steeped in my upbringing as a preacher’s daughter in the 1960s Midwest. I understood my characters because they were in my DNA. I was familiar with the rural West Michigan setting because […]
Gifts For The Writer
I met Elizabeth Peavey at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast summer workshop several years ago. As the playwright of “My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother,” she gave her audience something to laugh about. She is a funny lady. As a workshop leader, she made her group of aspiring writers smile and laugh; if […]
Writing Plays Tuned Me Into My Creative Inner Being – Lessons Learned Along the Way
I didn’t expect to write a book in my life-time. It clearly wasn’t on my bucket list. As a kid, I don’t remember more than 2-3 books in our house. A dictionary, the Bible, and the phone book—slim, as I grew up in a small town of only 1,000 people. But, I was always interested […]
The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant
A half-forgotten family story provided the inspiration for this novel about an impossible love story, difficult choices, and their consequences, and a woman who rises from the ashes of her life. When I was about nine or ten, my family lived in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, in a small-ish town not far […]
Take Me Seriously??
A friend suggested recently I write an essay about how one went about being taken seriously as a female writer over fifty. My first reaction to this suggestion was actually surprise, and my second was wonder …. maybe she didn’t take me seriously? I sat back in my chair and regarded her more closely. No, […]
Writing Through Despair
One night, around the midpoint of writing my novel, I hit rock bottom. I’d wrestled all day with a plot problem I couldn’t solve. There had been no days off for months, my back was agony, my eyesight was blurred. Some awful compulsion was forcing me to continue doing the one thing I had proved […]
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