Tag: women writers
A Tale of Two Trilogies
One evening in 2009 a writing trigger was pulled in my mind; I sat in front of my computer and poured out a story of high adventure set in the present in an alternative new Rome, but with a twist. It included a hunky hero, but the story was driven by a young woman who transformed from a prickly […]
Getting Your Book Into A Bookshop
I speak as a bookshop owner. Someone who loves books. Most of us that run bookshops do, so please bear in mind that if you want us to stock your book we theoretically, will lend a receptive ear. But here are a few tips to help make the whole submission process a bit easier. Running […]
Balancing Creative Life
A number of life events pierce a person’s sense of finite time. Becoming a parent sits high on my list. My husband craved financial stability before we decided to start a family. For me, it was feeling the sting of our temporal existence; I watched my mother and aunt battle cancer at the same time. […]
Radio Daze: How Working In Broadcasting Influences My Fiction
“Let the listener invent their own dragon.” I can’t remember who uttered this line, but it has stayed in my mind since last century, when I took a BBC News Skills training course in London. The nervy young broadcast journalists renamed it News Kills. Until a man in tweed came to our stuffy classroom to […]
So You Want to Be a Detective
We writers are many things. Sometimes, our subjects make us into even more. When writing and promoting The Magician’s Lie, which features a stage magician as its main character, I did a lot of thinking about the similarities between illusionists and novelists. And to write my new book Girl in Disguise, inspired by the life […]
Writing, Redemption, and Pop Music
My “difficult second novel,” as yet unpublished, bears the rather ambitious title The History of the World in Pop Music. It’s not actually a history of the world in pop music, it’s the story of a girl growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Liverpool in the 1970s who discovers that the stepfather she […]
In conversation with Sonia Taitz, author of Great With Child
Having gone to law school and practiced law for several years, what made you decide to write books? I was one of those people, common in the children of immigrants, who wanted to “succeed” in academics and my career without really knowing what I wanted out of life beyond that. I always loved writing […]
Winning The Waiting Game
One thing I never expected when I embarked upon my writing journey was how much time I would spend waiting. Waiting for word on literary submissions; for agents’ responses to queries; for editors’ feedback on manuscripts; for magnificent covers to announce my novels to the world; for reviews to catapult said novels to the top […]
Women Writing the Erotic: Sexual Themes in Fiction
Love, yearning, loss, truth and deceit, freedom and constraint: these themes have long occupied a place in our literary canon. From classical literature, we’re familiar with the torment between Cathy and Heathcliff, and between Jane and Rochester. Within the subtext of these two classic stories of love, lies a narration of sex and sexual desire, […]
It’s Not Rejection; It’s Feedback.
I imagine the easygoing among us don’t remember their first time receiving constructive criticism; teflon, some people, or indifferent. Not me. In primary school the report card system was E for excellent, S for satisfactory, and U for unsatisfactory. I swam in a pool of excellence until the day I received an S in handwriting. By the […]
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