Imagine being invited to lunch by your ex-husband and his wife to discuss what to do with the hard-to-manage teenager you all have in common. Imagine that, instead of actually going to lunch, they simply stay in the car, turn to you as you sit in the back seat, and accuse you of providing drugs [...]

To enter the world in Promised Valley Rebellion is to experience a culture that is both familiar, with the emotions, fears, temptations and desires all humans possess, yet faraway and misty and almost like the Middle Ages, but not even exactly like that either. It’s definitely in another time – one that divides its days [...]

“I just wanted to see what was simply hidden by their shame.  I just wanted to see what they did when the forces of the social world weren’t constraining them.” Brendan Cox’s Left Unspoken is not your everyday novella.  When Raymond “Ray” Cobley was six years old he learned that his parents agreed to have everything he says [...]

As a writer, I’m constantly coming up with new worlds, new characters and new storylines to fill the novels that I write. I find it can be somewhat difficult keeping a good mental picture of some of my characters – especially minor ones, and setting can be difficult to keep straight too, considering I make [...]

In Set Yourself Free Ellery, Ellery Roulet is an American with a career in Paris and she has made an emotionally crushing discovery.  It threatens her marriage to Julien and the life she knows as a mother to twins Evie and Maddie.  The story is told from Ellery’s point of view as well as that [...]

There’s a huge amount of self-publishing wisdom in this Reddit AMA from Hugh Howey, author of the Wool series (here’s the lowdown on a Reddit AMA).  The main takeaway is that writers need to be patient.  With all the overnight successes in self-publishing (Amanda Hocking), one might be led to think that’s the way you [...]

Taleist has a nice posting asking the question: Should You Comment on Amazon Reviews? My books’ pages on Amazon aren’t my pages, and readers don’t go there to find me. In my opinion readers should be able to browse a bookshop without bumping into authors fussing and preening next to their books; thanking kind reviewers [...]

Derek Thompson is a confident young man. “The reason I enjoy making lists so much,” he writes, “is that it is almost impossible to screw up. I mean it’s your list.” So it is with memoir: personal experience is something owned. Although this book is primarily made with blog posts, this is definitely a memoir. [...]

In this episode of The Indie Book Podcast, we review The Mill River Recluse, a literary novel that made a huge splash [...]

Literary - The Mill River Recluse [ 23:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I look for clues within the first paragraphs of a novel as to what particular kind of story the author wants to tell me and how she intends to go about it. The first two sentences of this novel irritated me: “I don’t want to be a writer. I want to be a painter.” That [...]