Reading whilst writing
All writers should read. We all read what we want, what we love, and most writers I know read their friends’ books, but are you reading your genre? Reading other books in your genre lets you know what current writing…
Category: Historical Novel
An Interview with Juliette Fay, author of The Tumbling Turner Sisters
Juliette Fay’s fourth book, The Tumbling Turner Sisters, is the story of four girls who try their hand as an acrobatic act in 1919 vaudeville, in an effort to save their poverty stricken family (Gallery Books 2016). Ultimately it is a…
The Thrill of Discovery, The Agony of the Fact
I decided to write a historical novel because I wanted to get completely out of my day-to-day life and contemporary everything—terrorism, the failure of capitalism, modern marriage, childhood and adolescence, politics, racism, climate change, you name it. Did I have…
Friday Feast: An Open Letter to Authors at Bookstore Tables, How Rejection Shaped One Writer, How Novelists Recover History’s Marginalized Heroes, Donald Ray Pollock’s 5 Writing Tips, and What Makes a Bestseller
Aw. It’s sad to watch a poor, lonely author in a bookstore or at a book festival who simultaneously desires and dreads conversations with customers. Because people! Conversations! Eeek! And then there are those authors who flag you down like street canvassers…
Friday Feast: The Appeal of Depressing Books, How to Know If Your Writing Is Any Good, Southern Summer Reading Round-Up, Where Books Are All but Non-Existent, and How Historical Fiction Does What Textbooks Cannot
Like the author of our first link, Pamela Erens, I’m drawn to depressing books. The darker the better. I can tolerate a happily ever after story, but only after the characters have suffered great trauma to get to the rainbows on…
Friday Feast: Why Rejection Feels Personal, Shitty Job = Better Writer, Things You Should Worry about While Writing a Novel, Writing Historical Novels Set in Eras You Know Nothing About, and Irish Writers on How Their Irish Heritage Influenced Them
Let’s kick off the weekend by reading a little bit about the sting of writerly rejection. Then, we’ll slide into how your shitty day job is at least making you a better writer (yay). We’ll get anxious with another writer and…