Category: Author’s Alley
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How to Create Characters With Real Chemistry
Hint: attraction starts long before anyone removes clothing. There is a widespread misunderstanding, encouraged by lazy storytelling and people who think smirking counts as personality, that chemistry between characters is simply two attractive humans standing near each other while saying suggestive things. That can create heat for a moment. It does not create the kind…
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Build Connection, Not Pressure: Author Marketing Tips
Please stop shouting “buy my book” into the void. There is a particular energy online that readers recognize instantly. It arrives breathless, needy, and vaguely aggressive. It says things like “Why is no one supporting authors?” or “Please buy my book, I worked so hard,” or “If everyone who follows me bought just one copy…”…
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The Gardener
He left mint on her doorstep on a Tuesday, and she spent the whole morning convinced it was a mistake, intended for next door. On Wednesday he left thyme. On Thursday it was rosemary and a small card that said ‘From the allotment. Roof garden on the right. — Seb.‘ She lived alone in the…
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Undone by Degrees
The thing about Layla and Julian was that everyone had seen it coming for a year and a half except the two of them. The whole team had a group chat about it. There had been a spreadsheet. And now they were alone in the office at nine PM on a Friday — everyone else…
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Almost Brave
Her daughter fell asleep on the train home from the school trip and Fia sat beside her in the window seat watching the city blur past and thought: this is the best thing. This specifically. This warm weight against my shoulder, this smell of sunscreen and someone else’s snacks, this small life that chose me…
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Salt and Light
The restaurant closed at eleven. By midnight the kitchen was clean, the staff gone, and it was just Marco at the pass, eating his own food standing up the way chefs always did — the last rites of the night shift. He was used to this. He’d been used to this for fifteen years. He…
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The Bookshop on Crane Street
She was looking for the same out-of-print book he was looking for, and they found this out standing in the fiction section of the small second-hand bookshop on Crane Street, each holding half of what turned out to be the same copy — a split spine, a missing jacket, loved to pieces by whoever had…
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The Secret Life of a Romance Author
Mostly typing. Occasionally crying over fictional men. There is a glamorous fantasy about author life that refuses to die. It involves candlelit desks, effortless genius, fresh flowers, meaningful window gazing, and manuscripts appearing in elegant stacks while the writer murmurs brilliant lines into the universe. A charming lie. Deeply committed to aesthetics, completely unserious about…
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If Your Book Isn’t Perfect, Publish It Anyway
Perfection is often just fear wearing expensive shoes. There is a private little prison many writers live in for years. It has lovely wallpaper, color-coded folders, seventeen revised opening chapters, and a manuscript that is “almost ready.” The bars are invisible, which is convenient, because then people can call it standards instead of what it…
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After the Wedding
The maid of honour and the best man ended up on the same hotel balcony at midnight because they’d both needed air from the same wedding. This was, Madeleine reflected, statistically inevitable — spending an entire day helping two people love each other publicly tended to clarify things. Specifically, it had clarified that she had…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 