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This week's podcast features Suzanne Mattaboni (Once in a Lifetime, Touchpoint Press, March 2023). There's much more to 1980's America than disco balls and Andy Warhol and in Mattaboni's debut novel we get to explore the avant-garde art scene, New Wave culture, and what it was like for a young woman trying to figure out what she wants in life amid the turmoil and energy of a burgeoning new era, shaped by young people—their clothes, their music, their boisterous embrace of life. Hear the unusual sub-groups on Facebook Suzanne has used to publicize her book and the important role networking has played in her success.

Suzanne Mattaboni is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer of women's fiction and horror. She's a podcaster, Newsweek Expert Forum contributor, and former Newsday reporter. Her debut novel Once in a Lifetime, winner of a Pencraft award and a Paris Book Festival award, is available on Amazon. Suzanne has been published in Seventeen, The Huffington Post, Mysterious Ways, Guideposts.com, Motherwell, and Child. Her work has appeared in anthologies including the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, the '80s-themed Pizza Parties and Poltergeists, the Scars anthology, and the upcoming new wave concert "fanthology" Howard Jones – We're In This Together. Suzanne is a past winner of Seventeen magazine's Art and Fiction Contest and was named one of Lehigh Valley Business' 2022 "Women of Influence..

To learn more about Suzanne, go to https://www.suzannemattaboni.com

Our guest this week is Linda MacKillop (The Forgotten Life of Eva Gordon, Kregel Publications May 2022). Linda took a rough draft she'd worked on for years into her new MFA program and emerged with a polished manuscript, including a central character often likened to Olive Ketteridge. We discuss what it's like when your protagonist is both difficult and suffering from memory loss, (which of course makes her unreliable) and how switching from first person to third person close made that task more manageable. She also shares marketing tips about interfacing with local community resources and how she didn't avoid, but embraced using her faith to enrich the story's themes.

Linda MacKillop writes fiction for both adults and young people, and creative nonfiction. Her articles and essays have appeared in books, magazines, and literary journals such as Under the Sun and Relief Journal. The Forgotten Life of Eva Gordon is her first novel. Hotel Oscar Mike Echo, her middle-grade novel, releases in June 2023. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. As the mother of four adult sons, she and her husband live in an empty nest outside of Chicago.

To learn more about Linda, click here.

Our podcast guest this week is Grace Marcus (Visible Signs, Touchpoint Press, May 2022). Grace, a debut author at 75 years old, shares lessons she learned along the line, including not signing with the first agent who makes an offer to trusting your gut when it comes to major rewrites. We discuss her marketing initiatives which include talks at senior centers and short writing workshops in exchange for a book purchase at libraries as well as her writing process, which she describes as "creep, creep, creep, lurch."

Grace Marcus holds a Master in Theatre Arts from Montclair University. Her debut novel, Visible Signs, published by TouchPoint Press in May, 2022. An early version of the book was a semifinalist in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

She has been an actress, waitress, social worker, newspaper editor, and radio and cable TV show producer to name a few of the byways on her road to becoming a writer. Her work has been published in Philadelphia Stories, The Bucks County Writer Magazine, Adanna Literary Journal, TheWritersEye, Women on Writing, Me First Magazine, Carolina Woman, and Embark Literary Journal. A Brooklyn native, she has lived on both coasts, and now calls North Carolina home where she is working on a new novel.

To learn more about Grace, click here.

This week's podcast guest is RLynn Johnson (Cry of the Heart, MilSpeak Books, May 2022). Taking inspiration from her years spent in the JAG Corps of the DOD, Robin fashioned a story of long-term female friendship and her first-hand experiences of being a female officer in the Army into her debut novel and then through a networking contact, found a publisher who specializes in stories told by military personnel, under the non-profit MilSpeak Foundation. But now that she's caught the writing bug, she's trying out the cozy mystery genre for her next endeavor.

RLynn Johnson, a military brat herself, is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps. Over the course of her military career, she served in California, the Republic of Korea, Alaska, Maryland, Kansas, Virginia, Florida, Washington, DC, and the United Kingdom. She now works as an international law attorney for the Department of Defense and lives with her rescue dogs, Dot and Dash, on the Pinellas County beaches. Johnson's debut novel, Cry of the Heart, was released by MilSpeak Books in May 2022. She is also a contributing author to Invisible Veterans: What Happens When Military Women Become Civilians Again, edited by Dr. Kate Hendricks Thomas and Dr. Kyleanne Hunter (2019).

To learn more about Robin, click here.

This week's guest is Janis Robinson Daly (The Unlocked Path, Black Rose Writing, August 2022). March is Women's History Month and how better to celebrate this popular sub-genre of women's fiction than with Janis, an active member of the WFWA Facebook sub-group and a debut writer whose great-great grandfather inspired her fictionalized story of the first women's medical college at the turn of the century. Listen as well to our discussion of how libraries are an untapped sales avenue for authors and learn where to download Janis' curated list of 31 books featuring research-rich stories of women who made history. .

Inspired by learning an ancestor was a founder of the Woman's Medical College of PA, Janis Robinson Daly felt the stories of the college's graduates needed to be told. With a love of history, she dove into research and began writing, balancing authenticity and details with a flair to create emotional connections to fictional characters.

While her family has roots in Philadelphia, she is a Boston girl through and through, from her accent to the New England Patriots flag hanging from her house. She graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Wheaton College MA, at the time, an all-women's college. At Wheaton, she developed a fond appreciation of supportive female relationships and a heightened awareness of female-centric issues. Both directed her writing of The Unlocked Path.

Splitting her time between Cape Cod, New Hampshire, and Florida, a tablet becomes her Kindle library and writing desk, packed into a travel bag for reading and writing wherever she might land. More adventures beckon her to document other women in history whose stories need to be discovered.

To learn more about Janis, click here.

This week's podcast is with Erin Litteken (The Memory Keeper of Kyiv, Boldwood Books, May 2022). We discuss the serendipitous timeliness of her book, which examines the tactic of Holodomor (or forced starvation) which Russia utilized during their invasion of Ukraine in the 1930's, her experiences with a newer small press based in England, her best advice to beginning writers, and her love of the rabbit hole called research. Added bonus: hear her formula for getting 5500+ reviews on Amazon in less than ten months.

Erin Litteken is an international bestselling author of historical fiction. Her debut, THE MEMORY KEEPER OF KYIV, has been translated into fourteen languages and was the 2022 winner of the She Reads Best Historical Fiction Award. With a degree in history and a passion for research, Erin draws inspiration from her family roots, and in particular, her great-grandmother's stories about life in Ukraine before, during, and after WWII. She lives outside of St. Louis with her husband and two children.

To learn more about Erin, click here.

This week's podcast is with Melanie Mitzner (Slow Reveal, Inanna Publishing, May 2022). Melanie started her writing career as a playwright and screenwriter but switched to the novel form for this story of an artist examining her life choices in 1990's New York. We discuss her decision to print with Inanna (renowned feminist press), differences when you publish in Canada, the research needed to capture a specific time period, and what's involved in creating characters who differ from you in terms of gender, heritage, and lifestyle.

The novel Slow Reveal, was published by York University's Inanna Publications on May 3, 2022, is a Best of Women's Fiction Debut 2022 and Fiction Bestseller at Berkeley distributor SPD Books. An excerpt of her novel Too Good To Be True was published in the Harrington Lesbian Quarterly. An Edward Albee fellow for her screenplay Zero Gravity, she was a finalist in the Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowships for her screenplay Dodge and Burn. Her screenplays In The Name of Love and Out to Lunch were finalists in the Houston Film Festival Screenwriting Competition. She was awarded fiction grants from Vermont Studio Center and Summer Literary Seminars . As a journalist, she covered the tech industry, television production and visual effects. Her work is published in Wine Spectator, Gay and Lesbian Review,Vol1Brooklyn, Bloom and San Francisco Bay Times. Interviews and excerpts are on Open-Book, the syndicated Rainbow Country radio show, Glad Day Bookshop TV and Hasty Booklist. She's a member of the Writers Union of Canada, ELAN and Quebec Writers Federation.

To learn more about Melanie, click here.

Listen to this week's podcast with our guest Karen Winn (Our Little World, Dutton, May 2022). Karen's an example of how helpful writing conferences can be as she met her dream agent at a Muse and the Marketplace event in Boston and then worked with her on an extensive revision before going out on sub. Hear what it's like to publish through an imprint of the Big Five, including cover design, titling (hint: they may change it), and book promotion and how part of Karen's journey has been homing in on what works best for her in terms of both writing process and generating ideas.

Karen Winn's debut novel, Our Little World, was published in May 2022 with Dutton/ Penguin Random House. Having been a nurse for decades, she is now pursuing writing as a second career. Karen's short stories and essays have appeared in Hippocampus, Lithub, Writers Digest, and elsewhere. Originally from New Jersey, where she obtained a low-residency MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, she now lives in Boston with her husband and children.

To learn more about Karen, click here.

This week's podcast is with Judith Brenner (The Moments Between Dreams, Greenleaf Book Group Press, May 2022). An historical fiction which encompasses not only the polio epidemic but also issues of domestic abuse, Judith's novel is a homage to both her mother and grandmother as well as the sacrifices women made in the years directly after the war. We discuss her publisher's process for picking the book's title, the questions she's asked most often at book clubs, and the quirky way she makes money as a writer.

Judith Brenner is a freelance journalist, and a book editor with her own company, Creative Lakes Media, LLC. She owns the national Sharpeners' Report and publishes related sharpening non-fiction books about how-to sharpen blades, from beauty tools to clipper blades. Judith completed a certificate program for an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She earned her MBA in Marketing from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and her undergraduate degree from Columbia College in Chicago, where she was raised. Her favorite seasonal writing desks are at a cabin in Minnesota and in California's Coachella Valley. Travel and gardening, reading and enjoying family are her greatest joys.

To learn more about Judith, click here.

This week's podcast is with Eileen Brill (A Letter In The Wall, Spark Press, May 2022). We discuss how fate dropped her story's inciting incident into her lap during a home renovation, the Facebook group her husband cultivated that wound up propelling her book to Amazon heights, and how she's learned an important lesson – that authors need to embrace being an active cheerleader for their own books. .

Eileen Grace Brill is a painter, writer, and sign language interpreter who grew up outside of Philadelphia and graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a BS in economics. She has written professionally for the restaurant, hotel, and commercial real estate industries. A Letter in the Wall is her first novel, though she has been a writer all her life; beginning at age four, when she wrote a poem (filled with spelling errors!) for her babysitter. Eileen's short story "Christmas Angel" appeared in the international literary magazine Beyond Words in 2021. She and her husband, Eli, raised their sons in her hometown of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, where they still live, along with their two adopted mutts, Athena and Gaia.

To learn more about Eileen, click here.