“The artist must be deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need and harken to its words alone.” —Kandinsky.
Several years ago, I entered a Master’s in Creative Writing program as a poet, but I was equally interested in writing fiction and signed up for several short story workshops. My experience in the poetry classes led me into exciting new places as a writer, opening me up to undiscovered parts of myself and of the poetry world. But it has taken me many years to fully recover from the fiction workshops. (more…)
I recently read the book Words as Eggs by Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart. The idea for the work, and the chapter from which the title comes, originated in one of Lockhart’s dreams. A voice in his dream said “Do you not know that words are eggs, that words carry life, that words give birth?” (92). 
Welcome to Michelle Cameron, the author of Jewish historical fiction. Her most recent is Napoleon’s Mirage, the sequel to Beyond the Ghetto Gates. Previous work includes Babylon: A Novel of Jewish Captivity, a finalist in religious fiction in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the award-winning Beyond the Ghetto Gates and The Fruit of Her Hands: the story of Shira of Ashkenaz. Michelle is a director of The Writers Circle, a NJ-based creative writing program serving children, teens, and adults. She lives in Chatham, NJ, with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud. 
I’m sitting in a classroom, facing my expository writing students. They stare blankly at me after spending the past few weeks together, delving into the essay’s puzzles, reading and writing, talking and thinking. I’ve just urged them to try to dramatize their thinking on the page. I say, “Most professional writers do it automatically.” 
As we sit here the week before the US elections and to my mind, the most important election in my lifetime, I wonder as I often have in the past, what’s the point of continuing to write in the face of all that worries the world. I felt this way after 911 and during the pandemic and the feeling is coming back again. I’ve been doing lots of political work which has lifted my spirits because, for me, action is the only cure for despair. But I’ve developed a powerful case of what I call “creative anxiety.” It’s happened to me before and I’m sure it will again. I’ve been away from the novel I’m working on for over two weeks. My characters are calling to me from where I left them, mounted on horses, hiding in a thick forest, searching for a young woman who has fled a convent.
Curva Peligrosa, who entered this world in September 2017, has just turned seven. Who, you may ask, is Curva, and why should I care about her? If you’re also a Regal House Publishing author, you’ll want to give tribute to 
I’m grateful that I live in a big city where I am forced to rub up against people who are not like me.
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (
Valerie Nieman’s historical novel, Upon the Corner of the Moon, is now available for pre-order with the release set for March 2025. This is the story of the Macbeths you never knew, rightful rulers who united Scotland in the tumultuous 11th century. The second of the two ALBA books, The Last Highland King, will appear in 2027. In the Lonely Backwater, winner of the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award, has been called “not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy.” To the Bones, a horror/Appalachian/ ecojustice novel, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, and now has a sequel, Dead Hand. She is the author of three other novels, a short fiction collection, and three poetry books. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and NEA fellowships and is professor emerita of creative writing at NC A&T State University. 
Whenever I give a talk or reading, someone in the audience asks where my stories come from. I find the answer more complex that what it would appear to be on the surface. What are my narrative seeds? What starts me on these explorations of others’ lives? 
Winner of The Writer’s Union of Canada’s Prose Contest in 2016, 
Okay, I’ve been writing for longer than I care to remember, but I still can convince myself (arrogant? yes!) that I don’t need feedback from other writers. This attitude tends to take over when I’ve spent considerable time working on something, as I had with a memoir I’ve written. After all, it’s my story I’m telling. How could someone else help me to improve it? I don’t usually take this approach to fiction I’ve created; I assume it can be made better. But I’d persuaded myself that my memoir was ready to be published. 
Okay, so you’ve accomplished the impossible. An agent has expressed interest in your work and you’ve signed a contract. All those months (maybe years) of sending out your novel have paid off. Not only do you have an agent, but she’s in New York, on Park Avenue. A respectable established firm.
In addition to writing adult fiction and non-fiction, I also create pieces for children. Recently, I tried to start a children’s story of a girl sleeping in an elegant dollhouse based on a dream image that has stayed with me. But after a few sentences, I felt extremely critical of what I’d written. I had to stop. Let it breathe, I said to myself. Let the criticalness soften—fall away. 
A high-school dropout and a single parent at sixteen, my options were severely limited. I had a son to raise on my own, and I received no child support from his father. A quick learner, I parlayed the typing skills I had learned in my high school commercial course (it was assumed then that most women would end up as clerk typists or some version of that role) into a variety of office jobs after starting out as an office girl. Consequently, when I began writing my novel 
Bianca: The Brave Frail and Delicate Princess, published, 12/1/2017
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
About Master of Alaska
Keith R. Fentonmiller will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Please click here to enter to win $50 Amazon/BN GC: “
Keith is a consumer protection attorney for the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. Before graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, he toured with a professional comedy troupe, writing and performing sketch comedy at colleges in the Mid-Atlantic States. His short story, 
Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, as well as a fiction writer, hiker, and cook. His work has been shortlisted for an Aeon award and appeared in Morpheus Tales and the SFFWorld anthology You Are Here: Tales of Cryptographic Wonders. He and his wife live in Virginia, where they care for an affable German Shepherd, occasional foster dogs, a free-range toad, and a colony of snails who live in an old apothecary jar. His website and blog are at AdamRShannon.com.
mount of short fiction, and has released three collections set in her superhero universe, starring Velma “Velveteen” Martinez and her allies. Seanan usually needs a nap. Keep up with her at 
Synopsis of In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree by Michael McLellan:
starving, and on the run from Confederate militiamen.
storytelling. A self-proclaimed blue-collar writer, he draws on his experiences and observations to bring relevant and compelling topics to life.
Lenny Decker is fleeing the American Dream while trying to comprehend its reasons and rules after being rattled from an exposure to its possibilities. Set in the mid-1990’s in a quiet California beach town, populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, and replete with examples of some of life’s crueler—yet hilarious—ironies, ‘On the Beach’ is story of what happens when one young man’s dreams bump up against reality.
Brandes lives in the small river town of Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, with her husband and two sons. She’s worked as a geologist and environmental scientist for twenty years. Currently, she’s focused on improving local ecology using native plants in small public and residential gardens. Kate is also a fiction writer and artist and has recently published her debut novel The Promise of Pierson Orchard. Kate is visiting my blog today as part of an extended blog tour. If you’re interested in following Kate, you can find dates of future stops here: 
Ms. Strader is a landscape architect in southern Arizona, the very same area where she became one of the first women on a Forest Service fire crew in 1976.
Where do your characters come from?
vel and intrigue a prospective reader, all in a maximum of about five words. It’s a tall order. My favorite titles come from the text of the novel. For example, To Kill a Mockingbird is a perfect title. It comes from the text; it conveys one of the main themes of the book, but you don’t know that until you read the book, so it’s intriguing, and it’s only four words. Surface and Shadow isn’t lifted directly from the text, but the words are mentioned in the context that the title is meant to convey. I’ve been pleased to see from some of the Amazon reviews that readers picked up on that context.
rd-winning author of the Dreamslippers mystery series and other works and has hundreds of story design credits in digital games. She blogs weekly at 
e environment. For example, we had some confusion when we released my first book, Cat in the Flock, as Amazon’s bots assumed the book fit into a category known as ‘pet noir.’ But ‘Cat’ came from the protagonist’s nickname, Cat, short for Cathedral.