Category: Author’s Alley
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In the Garden
He wasn’t a garden person. He’d said so, clearly, at the beginning: *I can keep a cactus alive. That’s my upper limit.* He was someone who lived in his head, who found the pace of growing things disorienting, who could not tell a weed from a herb. And yet. Sylvie looked up from where she…
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7 Romance Books for Readers Who Love Powerful Women
There was a time when romance heroines were often written as people things happened to. Thankfully, those days are fading. Today’s romance readers want women who make decisions, start trouble, save themselves, build businesses, protect families, run kingdoms, lead covens, and occasionally set entire storylines on fire. Power looks different in every book. Sometimes it’s…
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The 2a.m. Rule
They had a rule. It had formed without discussion, the way most real rules do, through repeated practice until it became law. The rule was: you could wake the other person up for the important ones. Not anxieties, exactly — not the three AM spirals that you had to learn to ride out yourself. But…
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Why Most Authors Burn Out Before They Succeed
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that happens when you turn creativity into constant visibility. Not writing itself.Not storytelling.Not even publishing. Visibility. The posting.The marketing.The algorithms.The pressure to be entertaining, insightful, productive, aesthetic, relatable, vulnerable, and somehow professionally branded at all times like a tiny exhausted corporation with Wi-Fi. A lot of authors don’t burn…
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The Right Way to Choose a Pen Name as an Author
Choosing a pen name feels deceptively simple at first. You sit down thinking:“How hard can it be to pick a fake name?” Three hours later, you’re spiraling because every combination either sounds like a Victorian ghost, a law firm, or someone who absolutely sells scented candles on Instagram while posting about moon water. Which honestly…
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The Weirdest Places I’ve Ever Gotten Story Ideas
People often ask where authors get ideas. The answer is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes an idea arrives fully formed. Sometimes it takes months. Sometimes it appears while you’re doing something completely unrelated and your brain decides, “Excellent. Now seems like the perfect time to invent emotional suffering.” Here are a few places story ideas…
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The Photograph
She found it while looking for something else. A photograph, tucked into the back of his bedside drawer, printed and creased at one corner. The two of them at a friend’s wedding, years ago — before the apartment, before they’d said those words, before they were *this*. They were standing slightly apart in the way…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 