Learning from other authors

As writers, we are not each other’s competition. We can learn from each other as we see how other authors take on the same creative challenges.

I recently read an advance copy of Gail Dwyer’s new novel, The Roof Above, which is coming out February 15, 2024 from our mutual publisher, Black Rose Writing. I enjoyed this book tremendously. (You can read my five-star review on Barnes and Noble.) Gail created an engaging character with Kelly McGowan and used her to give a unique perspective of Army life. What really attracted me to The Roof Above was how much it reminded me of my own Black Rose Writing novel, Amiga.

You could do a “Would you like to hear a story” meme with our books, as in “Would you like to hear a story about a young woman who has an intimate relationship with a soldier, and she leaves her hometown and has trouble finding a job in a new place?” (I’ll stop the similarities in the plot there because they lead to spoilers.) Our books have even more in common. They are both first-person narratives. They are both set in time periods that affect what happens in the story. (Amiga during the early days in the personal computer industry in the 1980s. The Roof Above during the War on Terror in the 2000s.) And they both deal with women in their twenties who face multiple traumas and family problems and grow through those experiences.