Writer Unboxed

from Barbara O’Neal:  I am delighted to have had the chance to interview my friend Barbara Freethy, who has experienced a truly astonishing trajectory as an Indie publisher this year. A traditionally published author for two decades, Barbara started experimenting with indie publishing late last year. Listen in as she talks about her journey, her [...]

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Recently I was a guest at the seventh Big Sky Readers and Writers Festival, hosted by the City of Geraldton. Geraldton is a country centre situated about four hours’ drive north of Perth, Western Australia. This small city built around a deep water harbour is home to a substantial fishing industry and serves as a regional hub [...]

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It began when we–Therese and Kath–were together on a long car ride. Maybe it was the result of too much caffeine. Or the fact that since starting and growing Writer Unboxed into a successful online community for writers, we’d been mulling over finding a way to bring a stronger component spotlighting readers but without losing [...]

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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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