I wanted to write about the external forces that shape our lives and how we deal with them and ultimately evolve as people. 

David A Anderson – 24 April 2025 Continue reading →

I have a small, select circle of “beta” readers with whom I share my work-in-progress. These are friends who bring divergent backgrounds and varied experiences to my writings. My objective is to reach out to all of them and, no mattter their differences, to engage their interest in my work.

Elizabeth Harlan – 21 April 2025 Continue reading →

There were parts of the book that were emotional for me because of my own past. I’m not ashamed to say that a few parts brought tears to my eyes as I was writing. 

Paul Flanagan – 18 April 2025 Continue reading →

Most of the characters are real people from history. Although dialogue and motivation are made up and reflect the times they lived in, I did my best to represent people fairly. There’s no character assassination! However, I did create a fictional character to be a nemesis to my main character.

Joan Fernandez – 15 April 2025 Continue reading →

The biggest struggle I had was with Magda’s voice. She spoke to me in a snarky, modern tongue, and I wanted her to have all the knowledge we have about what happened in the 2000 years since Jesus’ death, so that she could comment on current events

8 April 2025 Continue reading →

Since I love art, I wanted to create something related to it and began thinking about an art mystery involving lost artworks. Eventually, I came up with the idea of 100 lost Picasso paintings.

Beatrix Koch – 5 April 2025 Continue reading →

I firmly believe that the experience of carrying my first baby, loving her fiercely and having no choice but to give her up, was a means of prepping me for the challenge I was truly meant to have—raising a child whose disability is barely visible. 

Kathleen Somers – 1 April 2025 Continue reading →

When deciding which smidges of myself would go into those not-so-nice characters, I was reminded of the famous psychologist Carl Jung, and his concept of the “shadow”—the parts of us we’re not particularly fond of, and which we keep hidden away in the deep subconscious recesses of our psyche. For those not-so-nice characters, I mined suppressed tendencies—disagreeable and menacing—from my shadow.

Robert Steven Goldstein – 28 March 2025 Continue reading →

I try to write in a way that is accessible to readers with ordinary vocabularies, and I try to create worlds in which the reader can become immersed. 

Iris Mitlin Lav – 25 March 2025 Continue reading →

My own uncertainty, along with imagining what my grandmother may have felt about never knowing her background, was a big part of my idea for this book.

Theresa Christine – 21 March 2025 Continue reading →