Tag: women writers
The Inspiration Behind Counterfeit!, Deception! and Corruption!
When I’m asked about the inspiration behind the Suzanne Jones series, my mind scurries off in a number of directions. The books are all thrillers set in the sometimes murky world of international pharmaceuticals. And hence my thirty plus years working as a manufacturing consultant and technical writer in that industry obviously played a part. […]
Stayin’ Alive: The Space-Time Continuum Applied to Writing a Novel
There are two kinds of people in this world, those who appreciate science fiction and those who do not. Or, in other words, those who are able to grasp the concept of the space-time continuum, the idea that space and time are one and the same, and those who can’t wrap their brains around it. […]
The Importance of Writing Nonsense
Not long before we were married, my husband and I found ourselves chaperoning a road trip with a group of high school students. My grandmother, now deceased, had been kind enough to send along some homemade goodies for the journey. Two rest stops into the trip, my husband lifted the lid on Grandma’s Tupperware to […]
Stop Writing, Start Listening
Ah, the joy of writing conferences. The anticipation is almost worth the registration fee. For weeks prior, I dream of leaving my basement office to the spiders, traveling to a shiny new city, and sleeping sideways in a hotel’s king-size bed. Recently, I registered for a conference with about a hundred other writers. All women. […]
Finding Acceptance and Peace Through the Ceremony of Writing
As a chronically indecisive person, I have a hard time choosing what to order at a restaurant, let alone which restaurant to go to. I get lost in an endless cycle of pros and cons, no matter the decision. So, the really big ones—like whether or not to have a child—can be agonizing. I’d always […]
The Professor of Mean
I went to my first writers conference a very long time ago. It was held over the summer on the University of California Berkeley campus; I believe it was sponsored by the Berkeley English department, but as they say in the movie Airplane, “that’s not important now.” I won’t name the man who was in […]
The Best Books in Life Aren’t Always Free
If you’re like me (and pretty much every other author on the planet), your most fervent desire is to find readers who’ll love your writing and be ready, willing and able to pay for the opportunity to read all those beautiful words you’ve toiled over. But, to paraphrase our dear writer pal, Will Shakespeare, “therein […]
What’s Your Writerly Unique Selling Point?
When I decided to fly to California and train as a bounty hunter it wasn’t part of a marketing strategy but as research for my debut novel – Deep Down Dead. You see, back then I was about 40,000 words into my first draft of a thriller featuring a single mom bounty hunter, and I […]
Where I Find My Inspiration: Thelma Adams
I find a lot of my inspiration for writing novels in the past. For my current book, out November 6th, Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel , part of the inspiration came from a crime that occurred in October 1935. And that crime, the murder of “Pretty Amberg,” the aftermath pictured in the photograph above, somehow involved my […]
Writing and Cultural Appropriation
First things first; I wrote a book based on the life of Sojourner Truth. I’m a white writer. Sojourner was black. It was my first novel and it was published fifteen years ago, back when the discussion of cultural appropriation was simmering, not on a full tilt boil like it is today. I spent five […]
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