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
When I was 10 years old, I tried to write a novel. I don’t remember all the details, but it was a love story about two people who help each other heal. I wasn’t able to finish it when I was 10. I think the seed lived inside of me my entire life.
Patricia Leavy – 18 March 2025 Continue reading
One of my mentors told me that I had to let my characters get in trouble. That was my struggle: to write these complicated and unlikeable women without trying to justify or rationalize their petty actions.
Brandi Bradley – 15 March 2025 Continue reading
As a New Yorker, you could not help but be changed forever down to your emotional DNA with the way COVID ravaged the population. The city that never sleeps became a vast wasteland of masked zombies too scared to greet each other in passing, too frightened to come within spitting distance of anyone.
Lisa Fantino – 13 March 2025 Continue reading