Writer Unboxed

I’ve been asked, more than once, how I go about writing a book. Certain factors don’t change from project to project. Some writers do extensive outlining before they start writing. I read. For instance, before I wrote Endgame, the last Jax novel, I read a couple of nonfiction titles about guerrilla warfare. So that’s the [...]

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Jan’s confession: Prior to reading Keith’s book, Me Again, I had no expectation of doing a two-part interview, but it wasn’t long before I succumbed to his Nick Hornby-ish voice. When my ex-physician self began to laugh, nod and applaud his fictionalized account of a very real health issue – recovery from stroke – I [...]

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“I was born on a Tuesday morning. It was a difficult birth, because I was thirty-four years old.” Wry, self-aware, and intelligent, this is the voice of stroke-victim Jonathan Hooper, narrator of Keith Cronin’s debut novel, Me Again, out in hardcover though Five Star. Here’s the blurb for the book: Miracles can be damned inconvenient. [...]

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Therese here. Please welcome today’s guest, Joni B. Cole. A 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee, Joni is a popular speaker at writing conferences across the country, has been interviewed on national television shows including CNN, and contributes regularly to The Writer magazine. Just yesterday marked the release day for her latest book, Another Bad Dog Book: Tales [...]

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As I write this, it is the last morning of summer. My yearling kittens are crouched in the garden, watching a squirrel on the fence make his way through the face of a sunflower, methodically plucking out striped seeds with his tiny hands, cracking their shells, devouring the kernels. There are piles of hulls, here [...]

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Therese here, with a special post today. Several months back I heard about a group of authors who’d decided to pool their talents to create an anthology, giving all of the proceeds to charity. How wonderful, no? Since that time, the book has indeed been born. Called Entangled, it offers paranormal short stories by eleven [...]

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An amazing book by Yannick Murphy was the impetus to pull this post together, and I’ll gush about it in a minute. First, the question I hope we can work on today: How does a quiet book, likely written by a quiet writer, become known in a world increasingly dominated by the loud? The background During the [...]

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Therese here. Please welcome today’s guest, author Connie Briscoe, who’s here today to talk about the necessity of being hard on our protagonists. Connie is the author of seven novels, one novella, and one nonfiction book. Her debut, Sisters and Lovers, sold more than 100,000 hardcover copies and about 500,000 copies in paperback. Her work has appeared [...]

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If you’re joining us today, I’m with Erin Morgenstern, debut author of the much-buzzed, standalone novel, The Night Circus. In Part I of this interview, we discussed how Erin discovered the structure of her novel, the magnitude of revisions she underwent prior to signing with an agent, and the recent, surreal quality of her life. [...]

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Though not released until September 13th, it’s garnered so much buzz, you might already be familiar with the opening words of Erin Morgenstern’s standalone debut novel, The Night Circus: ~~~ “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It [...]

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I have finally turned in a final draft of my next novel, The Garden of Happy Endings. It has been a bear. Not kidding. I know that I whine about all of them, but this one really was hard. It was a subject I have not tackled before, and the narrative required a lot from me, and [...]

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If you missed part 1 of my interview with historical novelist Michelle Diener, when we discussed her international background and writing and research process, click HERE, then come back. Michelle’s brilliantly researched and fast-paced debut novel, a Tudor-set historical called In a Treacherous Court, recently released from Gallery Books. It’s the story of a female [...]

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