Hear us Roar

This week we’re talking to D.K. Silver (The Weight of Flowers, indie published, February 2023). A costume designer for most of her career, Dana is a visual person so vivid descriptions come easily – in fact, the impetus to writing her de...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Annie Cathryn (The Friendship Breakup, Alcove Press, February 2023). After three previous attempts at a novel, Annie hit the motherlode when, in four months, she wrote the story of a Mean Girls/Bad M...

This week’s guest is Audrey Burges (The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone, Berkley, January 2023). Audrey came up with the title for her book first, wrote it in one month during the pandemic, worked with her WFWA mentor to hone her manuscript, then quickly found both her...

Our guest this week is Kimberly McMillan (Never Enough Time, Warren Publishing, January 2023). Kimberly’s debut is squarely in the women’s fiction genre, exploring the journey of a young girl who loses her single mother, only to discover the father she thought was dead ...

 This week’s guest is Caitlin Avery (Life of Cyn, indie published, Dec. 2022). Tune in for one of our podcast’s most raw and honest interviews as Caitlin and I discuss her decision to out her high school rapist in the pages of her women’s fiction book, her inability to ...

Our guest this week is Barbara Boehm Miller (When You See Her, Red Adept Publishing, January 2023). We discuss learning to cut out extraneous back story, why she set her novel in a carnival, and why she chose a plus-size woman for her protagonist. On the marketing side,...

This week’s guest is Allyson Rice (The Key to Circus-Mom Highway, indie published, January 2023). Allyson, a multi-hyphenated actor, producer, artist, jewelry designer, and writer penned her debut novel as a screenplay to begin with, then used that as a structured outli...

My guest this week is Roxana Motiwalla Trabulsi (Of Mud and Honey, Ten16 Press. January 2023). Her debut is based on her parent’s struggles in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in Yemen as the country morphed into a Communist regime, her father was jailed as a political ...

This week’s guest is Brynn Barineau (Jaguars and Other Game, Orange Blossom Publishing, November 2022). After writing two YA novels that didn’t find a publisher, Brynn tried her hand at adult fiction and, writing from her then-home in South America, penned a gender-flip...

Our guest this week is Patricia Hudson (Traces, Firesign Industries, Univ of Kentucky Press, November 2022). Patricia’s historical fiction debut centers around 3 forgotten women—the wife and two daughters of Daniel Boone, the famous explorer and an early “social influen...

This week’s guest is Kathy Maresca (Porch Music, Touch Point Press, October 2022) In her debut novel, set in 1950’s Gainesville Florida, Kathy utilized stories from her Seminole family history to tap into a story of racial inequities, Southern culture, country music, an...

Our guest this week is Georgia Day (Of Sand and Bone, Rhapsody Press, November 2022). Hear how a recurring nightmare, complete with a haunting, portentous image, led Georgia to the story that would eventually morph into her speculative fiction novel. Set in a unique wor...

This week’s guest is Amy Watson (Closer to Okay, Alcove Press, October 2022). Amy and I discuss clinical depression (she and her husband both live with this) and how her goal in writing her debut was to give voice to this little-understood condition and ways to cope wit...

Our guest this week is Linda Moore (Attribution, She Writes Press, October 2022). You’ll smile at Linda’s analogy of how introducing your book to your audience is a lot like offering them chocolate chip cookies and about how men are still ge...

This week’s guest author is Karen Heenan (Coming Apart, indie published, October 2022). Our discussion ranges from what happens when the characters in your 1930’s stand-alone historical novel have more to say (your book turns into a trilogy), what to do when as agent as...

The podcast this week features Wendy Adair (The Broken Hallelujah, indie published, October 2022). Once Wendy had her core idea, snippets of facts as well as sources seemed to appear serendipitously, including the old trunk of a loved one. And we delve into genre – how ...

This week our guest is Gloria Mattioni (California Sister, Atmosphere Press, September 2022). Gloria, originally born in Italy, wrote six previous books before penning her women’s fiction debut, a story loosely resembling a traumatic incident in her own life. The memoir...

Our podcast guest this week is Nancy Yeager (When We Were Friends, Red Adept, October 2022).  This was Nancy’s debut women’s fiction although during the time she worked on it with both a book coach and a developmental editor, she...

This week’s podcast guest is Anastasia Zadeik (Blurred Fates, She Writes Press, August 2022). Her novel, which won the prestigious 2022 Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction, examines the role memory—whether suppressed, purposely hidden, or misremembered—plays in a pers...