Posts by Guest
Please welcome back long-time community member Keely Thrall as our guest today!
Keely writes contemporary and paranormal romance and is a proud member of the Stays Up Too Late Society of Book Addicts. (Their motto: “Just one more page, I swear!”) Her next short story, “The One That I Cherish” – in the Finding Forever Limited Edition Wedding Romance Collection – is available for preorder. Learn more about her books on her website, HERE.
Read on to learn about her efforts to grow a local writing community — especially if you live near Dulles, VA!
Welcome, Keely!
In March of 2024, I heard a call to step up to leadership in my local writers group.
Like any sane person, I stuck my fingers in my ears and said, “I’m not listening.” I had my priorities straight: write more stories, continue publishing, get better at marketing. Sell a few books.
But over the next two months, the whisper resurfaced, exhorting me, “It’s time.”
Time to put my strengths back into service in support of Washington Romance Writers (WRW), the writing community I’ve called “home” for 25 years.
That March, members of WRW were gathered at a rare in-person presentation and the then president asked, “What do you want from this community?” Among the replies:
“I want something on worldbuilding.”
“I’d like help with social media marketing.”
“How do I get better at conflict?”
“What should I include in my newsletter?”
All practical requests geared to helping writers at various stages. Yet even as folks voiced their individual asks, one wish was universally expressed:
“Nobody else understands me the way writers do.”
“I miss my people.”
“I want to network with other word nerds.”
“I crave more of the inspiration and support that comes when I’m with my writer pals.”
“I need more writer buddies.”
The common thread: each of us yearned for more time in the company of writers. For deeper connection.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that online communities don’t allow for building strong ties. I’m still logging into a morning Zoom writing session with a group I started back in May 2020. And, the leaders of Washington Romance Writers during the pandemic years kept our community up and running online when it could have poofed into nothingness.
But in March 2024, in that room with all of us rocking the particular high that comes from grooving with folks who are wired for story, that whisper reminded me: creating this kind of welcoming space is one of my superpowers.
Flash forward to July 1 when my term as president of Washington Romance Writers begins. We have 42 members (our pre-pandemic numbers hovered between 250-300). We have a July word count challenge starting. But the rest of the program year is a blank slate and I’m holding two priorities:
How could our team show folks that entrusting us with their time, attention and dollars would net them a worthwhile ROI? Could we develop a mix of online and in-person offerings to maximize member and potential member engagement opportunities?
Equally as important, how could we do this without burning ourselves out or eating through the chapter’s funds?
We make two immediate low-no cost/high impact changes:
We set up a […]
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Please welcome back today’s guest: author Alison Hammer—who is half of the writing duo Ali Brady; the USA TODAY Bestselling author of romantic, heartwarming, funny novels including The Beach Trap, The Comeback Summer, Until Next Summer, and Battle of the Bookstores. Their books have been “best of summer” picks by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Parade, and Katie Couric Media. Alison lives in Chicago and works as an advertising creative director. She is also the Founder and Co-President of The Artists Against Antisemitism, and the author of You and Me and Us and Little Pieces of Me.
The duo recently released a holiday novella—and Alison is here to share the story behind the story and tell us how letting go of the rules and trying something new was just the spark they needed.
Creativity can come in many forms—including the way you tell and share a story.
This October, my co-author and I found ourselves faced with something we haven’t really had before: a break. Instead of rushing to start our next project after we turned our Summer 2025 book in, we had some time to think about what we wanted to do next and even (gasp!) try writing something just for the fun of it.
Like millions of other people, Bradeigh and I both loved the Netflix series NOBODY WANTS THIS. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a hot rabbi (Adam Brody) who falls in love with “shiksa” – a non-Jewish woman (Kristin Bell).
This past year has been a difficult one for the Jewish community, so it was REALLY refreshing to see the general public get so excited about a Jewish story. (And yes, I know there has been some controversy around the depiction of Jewish women in that series…but that’s another topic for another day.)
While our Ali Brady books have always featured Jewish representation, the success of that show inspired us to try and think of a way we could tell a story that elevated the Jewish experience even more. Once we realized the first night of Hanukkah was on Christmas day for the first time in twenty years, a story was born.
A CREATIVE APPROACH TO WRITING
When Bradeigh and I are writing a full-length novel together, we usually spend a few weeks working on the plot and the characters, getting to know their personality and their story arc. Then we take about five or six months to write the first draft.
For this story, we had about one month total to write, edit and publish it. Which meant we had to shake things up and rethink the way we “always” did things.
Instead of our usual few weeks, we spent an hour one evening brainstorming and coming up with the characters, a loose plot for the story and a title—ONE NIGHT, TWO HOLIDAYS—and then we started to write.
While we knew the general beats of the story, we didn’t have time to make our usual chapter-by-chapter outline. So Bradeigh had the idea to lean into the fun of it and treat the writing process like improv.
One of us would write a scene then post it in our shared doc. Then the other person would read the pages (we tried to […]
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Therese here to introduce you to someone near and dear to me: my son, Liam. ❤️
Liam’s screenwriting journey started as a Rod Serling fan. Inspired by Serling’s allegorical storytelling, he attended USC’s film school where his thesis film, You Missed a Spot, was selected in over 30 festivals internationally. Since then, he has worked on the production-side of the industry, most recently wrapping as the line producer’s assistant on FX’s Mayans MC.
You may have heard about the downturn of work in Hollywood, and so Liam has bided his time between jobs doing something he was likely, inevitably, genetically born to do: WRITE. That the short story he’s written, that he’s now determined to see produced (see Kickstarter), taps into a real-life wound should come as no surprise to you, WU community.
But I’ll let Liam tell you about that, WU-style. Take it away, kiddo.
As writers, we often face the challenge of crafting stories that feel authentic, especially when venturing into experiences we haven’t lived ourselves. This was the case for me when I set out to write my new short film, Venus in Furs, a psychological thriller that personifies heroin as a woman.
I’m a filmmaker living in Los Angeles, and my life was deeply impacted when one of my close friends from film school overdosed on drugs laced with the powerful synthetic opioid, fentanyl. I remember the first time I met him—we were attending a mandatory lecture on the cinema and music of the 1960s. We were sitting on either side of another student we both had a crush on and got into a pointless debate about The Doors, as if this poor girl remotely cared about some band from five decades ago. He demolished me in the debate. The guy was like Jim Morrison himself—long-haired, charismatic as hell, with a ribcage you could practically see through his t-shirt.
After the girl successfully escaped, the two of us grabbed lunch and admitted we were only trying to impress her. Instant friendship.
During lunch, our conversation abruptly ended when he mentioned he was going to leave to smoke some opium. I assumed he was joking at the time—I mean, I had just met the guy. What, opium? You mean that shit from the 1800s? But over time, I came to learn that he was affected by a powerful addiction that, to him, wasn’t some unshakable affliction as often depicted, but rather the means to radically take hold of his post-high-school freedom and live out the fantasy of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle he so loved.
The last time I saw him, I visited his three-bedroom high-rise in Downtown Los Angeles, full of vintage records and a collection of Les Pauls paid for with credit cards he couldn’t pay off. It was the Fourth of July, and he was excited to launch fireworks at passing cars. At that point, I had witnessed the drug obliterate his ambitions. He had stopped attending classes, gained weight, and lost that magic spark that drew me to him in the first place. Heroin took everything from him. And yet he was so happy to participate in his own self destruction. In fact, sitting there with all his guitars and […]
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Please join us in welcoming guest Rebecca Anne Nguyen to WU today!
Rebecca Anne is an award-winning author, playwright and freelance writer. Her debut novel, The 23d Hero (August 13, 2024, Castle Bridge Media) was awarded the 2024 Readers’ Choice Book Awards Bronze medal. Her nonfiction book, Where War Ends: A Combat Veteran’s 2,700-Mile Journey to Heal, co-authored with Tom Voss, was the 2019 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Silver Award winner for Autobiography & Memoir.
Rebecca has published fiction, humor and nonfiction in many coveted outlets including The New York Times. Her short plays and one-acts have been produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami.
Welcome, Rebecca!
As a reader, there’s nothing that hooks me faster than a great love story—especially if that love story is accompanied by a pitch-perfect sex scene. But as a writer working on my debut novel, crafting my own sex scene turned out to be more challenging than I could have predicted. I struggled so much, in fact, that I considered scrapping the sex altogether. There was just one teensy, tiny problem: without that scene, my plot would completely fall apart.
The sexual tension between my two main characters had been simmering for 200 pages and all roads—and every plot point—led to sex. I had to give them the night they’d both been longing for: their first moments alone, their first kiss, their first everything. If I didn’t let my lovers get that close, it wouldn’t be as gut-wrenching when I inevitably tore them apart.
Before I started drafting, I thought I knew exactly what should happen during The Sex Scene. How she’d let her dress fall to the floor. The way he’d look at her, almost pained, as if her beauty was more than he could bear to behold. I knew right where he would kiss her just as I knew the particular strain of ecstasy that would sweep through her body the longer he did. Theirs would be a culmination of ten years of longing and the most satisfying physical, psychosexual, spiritual experience of their lives!
But as soon as I got them in bed, I balked. I left them there—naked, on the cusp of a kiss—telling myself these characters deserved their privacy. On the next page, I began a new chapter: “The next morning…”
My beta readers were ready to strangle me.
“I wanted more!” my friend Heather scolded. “You left me hanging.”
The last thing I wanted was to leave the reader unsatisfied, so I swung in the polar opposite direction, writing down everything—and I mean everything—in graphic detail. The shape and heft of certain body parts. How those body parts interacted with other body parts. The viscosity that resulted from the interaction. I was blushing at my keyboard, and I had to take frequent writing breaks to let the blood rush back to my brain.
But when I thought about someone else reading what I wrote, I was filled with dread, embarrassment, even shame. There was nothing shameful in what my characters were doing, but had I gone too far in describing it so explicitly and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination? I consulted romance novels, literary love stories, anything and everything with a sex scene, […]
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Today, it’s our honor to welcome longtime friend of WU Chris Blake today as our guest. Chris is a writer and editor with many years of daily newspaper reporting experience. After leaving the newspaper business in the 1990s, he served for 20 years as a senior manager for several trade and professional associations. He is currently an adjunct journalism professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT, and is the communications coordinator for the Connecticut Bankers Association. He has written an unpublished novel, A Prayer for Maura. Chris lives in Westerly, RI.
Please read on for a beautiful and personal post about the intersection of music and words–and son and father.
On Dec. 31, 2023, my son, Peter, passed away. He was only 25 years old. It was sudden and unexpected. He had an undiagnosed heart ailment. Peter was a talented musician who played the bass guitar. In the months since Peter’s passing, I think about him often and cling to memories of watching him play his upright bass at public performances.
Peter was a creative person at heart. Music was like oxygen to him, much as writing is to me. He was a quiet young man, but on stage he came alive. He leaned into his upright bass and his fingers flew across the fret board. I watched him perform countless times with jazz ensembles at various venues throughout Connecticut, and was blown away by each performance.
Some of my closest friends are musicians, and I am struck by both the similarities and differences in how musicians and writers approach their craft.
Process
In both music and writing, the creative process—the act of writing a song or novel—is unique to each artist.
As a writer, I thrive on structure and order. Peter thrived on (in the words of our esteemed leader, Therese Walsh) “good chaos.” Yet, the bass player joins the drummer in providing structure within a jazz melody. Peter was often part of the house band at open-mic nights at Black Eyed Sally’s restaurant in Hartford, laying down a steady beat, while adapting to the rhythm of the song and the various solos rendered by other musicians. There was always space within the melody for free-form solos. Good chaos.
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Jeff Tweedy, the songwriter and lead vocalist for the alt-rock band, Wilco, was asked about the songwriting process. “I’m not sure I can demystify something I feel wholly inadequate to explain,” he said. “For me, the moments that make my scalp tingle a little bit are when I hear myself sing a lyric out loud for the first time. On occasion I make myself cry. Not because I’m marveling at my songwriting genius or I’m overcome with my poetic gifts. It’s a moment that feels more like I’m witnessing something better than me, or better than what I imagined I could make, being born.”
I get that same feeling, but only on rare occasions. I once sat down and wrote a scene that went on for 35 pages. I was in the moment. Time did not exist. The words flowed out of me. I suspect I was experiencing something similar to what Tweedy discusses here.
I felt that way about Peter when watching him play the bass. In the words […]
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Please welcome award-winning author and playwright Victor Lodato to Writer Unboxed today!
Victor is the author of three novels. Edgar and Lucy was called “a riveting and exuberant ride” by the New York Times. Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, was named a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail, and was hailed as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel.”
His most recent release, Honey, released this past April to rave reviews like these:
“Rarely in literature—rarely in our lives—do we encounter someone like Honey Fasinga: fierce, complicated, and out-of-this-world sharp both inside and out. I cried, laughed, and screamed while reading this novel. Weeks after finishing, I am still looking for Honey everywhere. Victor Lodato’s Honey belongs in the halls of other legendary, unforgettable characters. This novel can rightfully be called a masterpiece.” — Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito
“Every woman is free to invent her own apocalypse, says Honey Fasinga, the stylish heroine of Victor Lodato’s new novel. Honey knows where the bodies are buried—she helped bury some of them—and at eighty-two she is still figuring out how to defend herself and those she loves against the dangerous bullies of this world. This novel is a wonder of strange kindnesses, unthinkable cruelties, and familial fracture. A sharply funny, searingly wise story about the way that a life lived on its own terms is the ultimate art form. Irrepressible and romantic, empathetic but refreshingly unsentimental, and ultimately unforgettable—like its heroine, Honey is a true original.” — Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist and NYT Bestselling author of Once Upon A River
Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.
Learn more about Victor and his body of work on his website.
Welcome, Victor!
Long before I starting writing novels, I was a playwright. Fourteen years into my life as a theater artist, I was invited to a writing residency at the Camargo Foundation in the south of France. I’d been invited there to work on a play—which I finished in the first two months of my three-month residency. So I decided to use the last month to start a brand-new play.
I began, as I always did, with a voice in my head—the music of a particular character’s way of speaking. Where some of these voices come from is one of the mysteries of writing. But, by that point, I knew to trust my process—to follow the characters’ voices until I figured out who they really were, and what the story was actually about.
Which is a way of saying that I always let the characters reveal to me what’s brewing at the back of my mind.
The new play that I started writing during the last month of my residency—it began with a monologue. Pretty quickly, I understood the main character was a child, maybe a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl, and she just wouldn’t stop talking. Twenty pages into the […]
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Please welcome Michael Castleman to Writer Unboxed today! Michael is the author of 19 books, both fiction and nonfiction, the latest of which releases TODAY. The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing is the first book to trace the 600-year saga of publishing from an author’s point of view, with emphasis on the possible joys and many perils of the 21st-century book business.
“Entertaining, fascinating, deeply researched, and crisply written, The Untold Story of Books is full of surprises. I worked in publishing for thirty years and was amazed how much I learned about the industry. No other book provides such a comprehensive and witty overview. The Untold Story of Books is a must-read for authors, aspiring authors, and anyone who loves books. The publishing industry is often shrouded in mystery. This book lifts the veil and provides a fresh, new, compelling perspective.”
—Mark Chimsky, former editorial director of Harper San Francisco, former director of trade paperbacks at Little Brown, and former editor-in-chief of the trade paperback division at Macmillan
We’re thrilled Michael is here to shine a light on a topic he knows well–the dark side of the business, and how we might avoid it.
Over the past decade, author scams have multiplied like the brooms in the Fantasia scene of Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” WU has done an admirable job helping authors detect scams—and avoid them. But few authors appreciate why scams have recently become so prevalent. The reason is the advent of digital publishing, and its result, an unprecedented avalanche of books.
1980 Vs. Today: What a Difference!
To understand why scams have proliferated so insidiously, consider these numbers.
No wonder so many authors feel so frustrated about marketing their work.
No Single Path
Back in 1980, book publishing involved a single path from idea, to proposal, to agent, offer, contract, editing, acceptance, and release—with champagne. Book promotion depended […]
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Please welcome back multi-published author Henriette Lazaridis as our guest today! Henriette is the author of The Clover House (a Boston Globe bestseller), Terra Nova (which the New York Times called “ingenious”), and Last Days in Plaka, which was published just yesterday, on April 9th.
Last Days in Plaka is Henriette’s most personal novel to date. A first generation Greek American and only child of expat parents, Henriette grew up speaking Greek as her first language and listening to her father relay Homer’s Odyssey. It’s no wonder that she has set her latest novel in Greece or that the story centers on issues of identity and nostalgia.
It’s also told via an omniscient narrator “who knows when to invoke the reader and when to extend their reach beyond the scene at hand,” said early reader Jesse Hassinger of the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA.
We’re going to dive a little more deeply than we generally do into the specifics of a book today, to better understand why Henriette chose to write this novel with a narrator’s voice. With that understood, a little more about the plot to orient you:
What do you do when you feel like your time is running out? Or when you’re uncertain that the time you’ve spent on earth so far is even meaningful? Searching for connection to her Greek heritage, Anna has left her parents behind in Astoria, New York to come to Athens, working at a gallery by day and making clandestine graffiti art by night. Irini is an elderly widow, once well-to-do but now dependent on the charity of others. When the local priest brings the two women together, it’s not long before they form a connection. Anna’s friends can’t understand why she spends so much time with the old lady, yet Anna becomes more and more rapt by Irini’s tales of a glamorous past, the mystery surrounding her estranged daughter, her lost wealth and the earthquake damage to her noble home. Together, they join the priest’s tiny congregation to study the Book of Revelations ahead of a pilgrimage to the religious site on the island of Patmos. Desperately seeking to find her purpose, Anna makes a reckless decision that endangers her life, exposes Irini’s web of lies, and forces herself to confront the limits of her ability to forgive.
How did Henriette land on an omniscient voice and why did she know it was right for her novel? Read on. You can also learn more about Henriette and her novels on her website.
When I began writing my third novel, Last Days in Plaka, the voice in which the story announced itself to me was omniscient. Someone–I had no idea who–was telling this story of two women in Athens in the summer of 2018. “This is not her story,” the book began in my head one August night. “She stole it from the young woman who did not know until the end that it was hers.” The novel came into existence right from the start as the tale told by someone who knew it all, who knew the end–and who knew even before I did that the character of the young woman would come […]
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Please welcome multi-published, bestselling, award-winning author Denny S Bryce to Writer Unboxed today! Denny’s trajectory as an successful author has been a brilliant sight to behold. Her debut novel was published in 2021. Three years later, Denny is about to publish her fourth novel with co-author Eliza Knight! More from Denny’s bio:
Denny S. Bryce is the bestselling, award-winning author of novels THE OTHER PRINCESS, A FACE IN THE SUN, and WILD WOMEN AND THE BLUES. Her new book (out March 5) is CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monore, co-written with Eliza Knight. Additionally, she is an NPR book critic, an adjunct professor at Drexel University, and a freelance writer who has written for Harper’s Bazaar and USA Today. She is also a member of the Historical Novel Society, Tall Poppy Writers, a women’s author collective founded by Ann Garvin, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, where she serves as the 2024 WFWA Guiding Scribe. Denny is represented by Wendy Sherman at Wendy Sherman Associates Literary Management.
Writing communities aren’t magic. They don’t fix all the woes of a writer’s life or provide the perfect dose of wisdom, critique, or networking opportunities that guarantee your novel lands on the New York Times or USA Today bestseller lists. Or that your Indie-published releases generate 100K a month. You still have to write the manuscript alone in the writer’s cave.
But none of this is to say that writing communities aren’t the next best thing to sliced bread!
This article contains everything you’ve ever wanted to know about writing communities and the role they can—and should—play in your writing journey. And yes, that is an over-promise, but I like to start big. So, let’s dive in.
I believe six key topics answer “the what and why” writers should join a writing community with clear benefits to their writing journey.
o Support and Encouragement
o Learning and Resources
o Feedback and Critique
o Networking Opportunities
o Accountability and Discipline
o Diverse Perspectives (bonus)!
Keep in mind that writing communities are about more than writing. They are a form of self-care, which means they help a writer’s heart and mind cope with the business of writing.
And with that, I’d like to provide some background on my writing journey, in part, and my involvement in writing communities.
First, I am a joiner. I am there if a group exists on a topic that interests me, let alone a subject I love. I also am okay moving on if the vibe, content, or expectations don’t support the goals I’ve set for myself. However, if you’re not this personality type, that doesn’t mean writing communities aren’t for you. However, if you write books, you already know what it takes to start a new project, immerse yourself, and then revise, revise, and revise until you have produced the best possible book you can write. So, apply that book knowledge and experience to writing communities that will help you achieve your goals (and don’t […]
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Please welcome C. S. Lakin to Writer Unboxed today! C.S. is an award-winning author of more than 30 books, fiction and nonfiction (which includes more than 10 books in her Writer’s Toolbox series). Her online video courses at Writing for Life Workshops have helped more than 5,000 fiction writers improve their craft. To go deep into creating great settings and evoking emotions in your characters, and to learn essential technique, enroll in Lakin’s courses Crafting Powerful Settings and Emotional Mastery for Fiction Writers. Her blog Live Write Thrive has more than 1 million words of instruction for writers meant to help level-up your writing. Welcome, C.S.!
Settings in fiction are not just backgrounds; they are living, breathing components of your story that can immerse readers in your narrative world. Whether it’s the bustling streets of a city or the tranquility of a countryside, the setting plays a crucial role in engaging your readers.
Fiction writers often ignore setting. Or it’s casually brushed over as if the writer begrudgingly knows something ought to be said about the place her character is in and just wants to “get it over with” and move on to the interesting elements in the scene.
An attitude like that shows a complete lack of understand of how powerful setting is.
Setting is perhaps the most versatile and useful element in fiction. It can reveal character motivation, backstory, past trauma, and the story’s cast, as well as reveal emotion and supply tension. If you haven’t considered how powerful setting can be, take some time to work on this key element in your fiction.
To help you get started, let’s explore five essential tips to help you understand the various elements of setting and create memorable, immersive worlds for your characters.
Tip 1: Choose Your Locale with Purpose
The choice of where your story unfolds can significantly impact your narrative. Consider locales that align with your plot, characters, and the emotional atmosphere you want to create. Best-selling author Emily St. John Mandel demonstrates this in Station Eleven, where selects settings like the post-apocalyptic wasteland and the Traveling Symphony’s nomadic existence to enhance the sense of survival, loss, and the enduring human spirit.
In Station Eleven, the world has been ravaged by a devastating flu pandemic, leaving behind a desolate landscape. The setting of a post-apocalyptic world serves a dual purpose. First, it magnifies the sense of isolation and vulnerability felt by the characters, emphasizing the fragility of human existence. Second, it becomes a canvas upon which the resilience and creativity of the characters are painted.
The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead—I see you, I see you—and hoped this was enough.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put […]
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Therese here to introduce today’s guest, though she really needs no introduction — at least not in the “you don’t know this person” way of things. You do know Keely Thrall, as she’s been a part of the WU community for a long time. But you’ve never met Keely this way before–as a published novelist–and it’s my sincere pleasure to reintroduce her to you with that in mind.
Keely Thrall writes “thrilling, enthralling paranormal and contemporary romance.” Her debut romance novel, The One That I Want, was just released this month. When I asked her if she’d like a share a short synopsis with us, she sent along two to choose from, and I got such a kick out of the spin between them that I thought to publish both here. Maybe seeing how the same story can be conveyed with a different twist and tone might empower another writer out there as they craft a pitch.
Short blurb
Keira and Connor must plan their friends’ engagement party. Awkward, considering Keira just broke off their no-strings hookup arrangement. Working–and playing–with Connor during a long, hot NYC summer is more fun than Keira anticipated–but scarier too. Because every kiss, every touch, and every shared secret cracks her open a little bit more, making her feel way too vulnerable for comfort. Will Keira retreat and stay safe or go after the one that she wants?
Blurb using universal fantasy hooks
I like control. Hand me a man’s tie, and I’ll put it to good use. But when the nice guy I’m hooking up with pushes for more and I cut the knots loose? He shows his stubborn side, unwilling to give me up. With each heated encounter I slide deeper into the fantasy we’re building, one where we have a future together. Now I’m hanging onto that control by my fingertips and all I want to do is let go.
Keely “believes that reading–and writing–romance fiction, with its focus on individual, familial, and community relationship-building, is a secret super power giving those of us who dip inside the world of Romancelandia an edge when it comes to navigating the age old question: ‘How do I human better?’ ”
Learn more about Keely and her writing on her website.
Welcome to the green room, Keely! It’s good to have you here.
The One That I Want, my contemporary romance debut, came out this month. To be accurate, I published it, gladly and proudly, with some fear, sure, but also a lot of relief. My road to publication has been a long time coming, a winding path I could have stayed on indefinitely if not for one real life plot twist: I learned how to set myself up for success. That mind shift took me from “aspiring” writer to “I’ve got the power. Let’s do this thing.”
I’ve been banging away at this writing aspiration for a while now. I started dreaming about being a published author in high school. In graduate school, I called myself a “writer who doesn’t write.” It was an easy way to claim an identity while preempting anyone who might dare to point out that writers write. In 2000, I joined Romance Writers of America and its affiliate local chapter, Read More
Gary Braver is the award-winning, international bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed medical thrillers and mysteries including FLASHBACK, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Three of his novels have been optioned for movies, including Elixir by director Ridley Scott.
Braver (Choose Me) skillfully alternates timelines in this unpredictable whodunit set in Cambridge, Mass. – Publishers Weekly
Under his real-life name, Gary Goshgarian, he is also an award-winning Professor Emeritus of English and fiction writing at Northeastern University, and has taught fiction-writing workshops throughout the United States and Europe.
With his 10th novel, RUMOR OF EVIL, releasing TODAY, October 3, it’s a pleasure to welcome Gary to WU!
In 2014, two 12-year-old girls from Wisconsin were arrested for the brutal knife attack of a 12-year old girlfriend. They told police that they stabbed their friend some twenty times because they wanted to appease Slender Man, a supernatural cartoon humanoid on the Internet, because they believed that the creature would kill their family. Luckily, their victim survived. And the two attackers remain in a psychiatric institution.
What drives kids to commit such senseless acts? Compelled by this question, I turned to research and uncovered insights about another, related scourge that threatens the emotional and physical health of school-age children: bullying.
There’s nothing inspiring about bullies. But the research I did to better understand them and their mindsets ultimately inspired my idea for the cold case at the center of my new thriller: adolescents committing a brutal crime.
From there, the character development process began. Here’s what my process looked like for Rumor of Evil:
Design a personality
According to studies, the most common characteristic of bullied victims is that they’re “different.” In appearances, they might be overweight, small, gangly, disfigured, or unattractive. Also their behavior is “odd”—they talk with a lisp or accent, they’re shy, insecure, and appear weak. Sometimes they’re from a different social, ethnic, religious or economic status; or as kids, they’re considered bad luck and friendless. In short, they’re outsiders to the accepted adolescent “norm.”
Although upsetting and disturbing, it is a sad reality that such stereotypes can hold and that they can permeate the minds of impressionable young people. So I designed my bully-victim to display characteristics that could have exactly that effect on young people: a 16-year-old Romany exchange student named Vadima Lupescu. Although she’s very attractive, she arrives in upscale Lexington, Massachusetts from a rural Slovakia in uncool outfits, speaking English with an accent. She also has strange customs, such as taking off her shoes when entering a home or standing up when the teacher enters a classroom.
Early on, her high school classmates have fun Americanizing Vadima—taking her to the mall to get her cool outfits, introducing her to hotdogs and backyard barbecues, and getting rid of those braids. They also treat her to a rock concert and give her a cool nickname, Lulu.
Examine stereotypes and their consequences
Given that this is a murder mystery, things needed to turn dark. I thought about how, often, the damning stereotypes people believe can lead to even more damning (and even lethal) behavior.
Back in the 2000s when this storyline was set, people were a lot less aware of sensitivities than they […]
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Please welcome back longtime WU community member, and one of our all-around favorite writerly peeps, Danielle Davis to Writer Unboxed today! In her own words:
“I write novels, short stories, and bad poetry under the name ‘Danielle Davis,’ which is an anagram of my real name, Danielle Davis. My horror and dark fantasy have been published both here and abroad by several people with excellent taste. You should check it out–all the cool kids are doing it.”
Learn more about Danielle on her website.
Writing Short Stories to Jumpstart Your Novel
What do you do when you reach a roadblock with your novel? Do you go for a long walk? Pour a glass of wine? Vent on social media? While all those things are helpful (at least to me), I like to go to a tried-and-true backup that I know I’m good at: short-story writing.
I got my start writing short stories in college, so they’re a comfort blanket for me. And I’ve found interchanging novel-writing with short story-writing provides a unique honing of writerly skills that I would otherwise lack if I only concentrated on my novel.
Here are some of the benefits writing short stories provide:
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We’re thrilled to welcome back multi-published author and long-time Writer Unboxed supporter/community member Stephanie Cowell today! Stephanie has been an opera singer, balladeer, founder of Strawberry Opera and other arts venues including a Renaissance festival in NYC. She is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart, Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet, The Boy in the Rain and The Man in the Stone Cottage (a novel of the Bronte sisters, forthcoming 2025). Her work has been translated into nine languages and made into an opera. Stephanie is the recipient of an American Book Award and has lived in New York City all her life.
Stephanie’s latest novel, The Boy in the Rain, might be a recent release, but its journey spanned half a lifetime.
“The Boy in the Rain is a love story of the highest order, so powerful for advancing important issues from a historical perspective in Edwardian England, but more significantly for vividly and elegantly capturing the passion, beauty and despair of a forbidden (at the time) affair between two men….The writing is exquisite, capturing their every feeling and breath. …makes one feel a spectrum of sensations, that challenges the mind, that creates characters as real as fiction can be, and shows us the great joy and intoxication of astute and descriptive writing.” – Jim Alkon, BookTrib
We are so happy for our friend’s triumph and to bring her story-behind-the-story to you today. You can learn more about Stephanie and her novels on her website and by following her on Facebook.
The story of my novel haunted me for 39 years from the first scribble to the published book. The obstacles in myself and in my world seemed insurmountable and yet it turned out just as it was supposed to be.
Of course, I cannot claim I wrote only one thing for all those years. I wrote a lot of historical fiction drafts and published five novels with good houses to some success. I made a nice career, but the most loved story remained in a cardboard manuscript box on the top shelf of my closet. It was a love story between two young men in Edwardian England and I called it The Boy in the Rain.
Most of us begin writing because we have burning stories inside ourselves, fragments, a glimpse of a profile, a character whispering, “Make me real.” Voices wake us up from our sleep and drive us to the keyboard, our bathrobes barely fastened, our desk lamp the only one burning in the nighttime house. Because though the characters in your novel are vivid inside you, they can only come to full life in a crafted novel. That is the only way they can go into the world.
Now a question about your novel. Do you have fragments of one inside you that you love more than anything? One in seventeen different drafts? Do you have a finished novel to be shown? And if you have gathered the courage to show it, and have agents and editors returning it, saying, “You’re a gifted writer but this sort of thing won’t sell,” or […]
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