Tag: women writers
Blogging For The Non Blogger
As a debut fiction writer, I was thrilled to be invited to join The Debutante Ball, a website that features five debut authors as they go through the joys and challenges during their year of publication. Each writer is assigned a day of the week to post a blog (I’m the Tuesday girl), and each […]
10 Ways Art Can Improve Your Writing
Writing and the visual arts may seem different, but at their cores, both are about good storytelling. I’m a life-long art junkie. I took my first drawing class when I was in kindergarten, have a degree in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University, and sketched the Old Masters in the great museums of Europe. This year, […]
Motivating Factors in My Life
Martha Lemasters spent almost ten years working as a PR writer at Cape Kennedy as a member of IBM’s team on NASA’s Apollo Program. Those years saw remarkable success in seven Apollo launches and six moon landings. Lemasters worked her way up the ladder from secretary to a respected writer and managed to find her […]
Chasing the Muse
Writers are often asked where they find their inspiration. ‘How on earth did you come up with that idea? I wouldn’t know where to start!’ For me, the ideas don’t flow until I begin writing, one thought then leading to another. I don’t know everything before I start, how could I? And would I still […]
Embrace Criticism, But Be True To Yourself
From our very first creative class, writers are conditioned to embrace honest – sometimes brutal – feedback, as a means of refining our art and making us into better authors. That said, it is human nature to feel cut to the bone when somebody lambasts our metaphorical baby – usually the result of months (or […]
Cover Story
‘Never judge a book by its cover.’ In publishing, we know that the opposite of this is true. I didn’t know just how true until the publication of my latest novel, Through the Barricades, an historical love story set in the early 1900s. I had had seven novels published by a variety of houses eg […]
Is Your Book Book Club Material? Ask A Book Club!
Beta readers. How necessary they are, but how hard to find. At least they were for me. I didn’t have that “writing bestie” who was dying to read my copy and who could be that magical combination of brutally truthful yet rah-rah encouraging. Most of my relatives stick to history or political tomes. My friends […]
How Agents and Editors Influence My Writing
Writing your first novel is a wonderful experience – the words flow out because you’ve been itching to write them, you know what you want to say, pretty much how you’re going to say it and if you get stuck, you can spend months unpicking the plot holes and re-writing the passages that don’t work. […]
Sending the Elevator Back Down
Several years ago, I heard an author say that when a writer “makes it,” it becomes his or her job to send the elevator back down for those waiting their turn. It was a great way to encourage authors who’ve made it to the other side—who got the publishing deal or who’ve seen their book […]
How Book Reviewing Influences My Writing
Before I published my books, and before I understood the importance of book reviews for an author, I always tried to leave a few sentences on Amazon and Goodreads about my reading experience. I’m a great believer in leaving (and reading) reviews for restaurants, holiday resorts, hotels, and other products, so why should books be […]
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