Tasha is an award-winning author, occasional librarian and cat owner. Her books include the Books of Ambha duology and The Jasmine Throne, (which is out now).

When she isn’t writing, Tasha likes to cry over TV shows, buy too many notebooks, and indulge her geeky passion for reading about South Asian history. She lives with her family in a mildly haunted house in London.

In this episode Tasha and I discuss:

• Why she wanted to depict different kinds of strength and how she pulled it off.
• Her advice for tying together multiple points of view. (Her novel has ten POVs!)
• How to write a book proposal for a novel and other advice for getting published.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Tasha Suri

Tasha Suri is an award-winning author, occasional librarian and cat owner. Her books include the Books of Ambha duology and The Jasmine Throne, out in June. When she isn’t writing, Tasha likes to cry over TV shows, buy too many notebooks, and indulge her geeky passion for reading about South Asian history. She lives with her family in a mildly haunted house in London.

You can find Tasha on her website or follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Jasmine Throne

Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne begins the powerful Burning Kingdoms trilogy, in which two women—a long-imprisoned princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic—come together to rewrite the fate of an empire.

Exiled by her despotic brother when he claimed their father’s kingdom, Malini spends her days trapped in the Hirana: an ancient, cliffside temple that was once the source of the magical deathless waters, but is now little more than a decaying ruin.

A servant in the regent’s household, Priya makes the treacherous climb to the top of the Hirana every night to clean Malini’s chambers. She is happy to play the role of a drudge so long as it keeps anyone from discovering her ties to the temple and the dark secret of her past.

One is a vengeful princess seeking to steal a throne. The other is a powerful priestess seeking to save her family. Their destinies will become irrevocably tangled.

And together, they will set an empire ablaze.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 361

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 361: Villains and Villainy, Antagonists and Obstacles: Crafting Conflict in Epic Fantasy – Interview with Tasha Suri appeared first on DIY MFA.

That was my first encounter with Dr Ruth Galloway, the protagonist of my mystery series set in Norfolk. No other character has appeared to me in quite such a dramatic way. Yet creating people is one of the most important jobs for an author, perhaps the most important. Without Ruth there would be no books; all the action – crime-related and otherwise – comes from her being who she is. Character is plot, I tell my creative writing students, and plot is character.

So how do we create complex characters? Sometimes your protagonist does materialise in front of you but, in most cases, you will have to do the alchemy yourself. And you will have to do it over and over again because you don’t just need a protagonist, you need an antagonist and all the characters in-between. A friend used to work for the long-running TV series Midsummer Murders (top tip: don’t go to an English village, especially if there’s a fete on) and she was told that, at the end of an episode, there needed to be four people still standing who could have committed the murder. That’s a lot of lives to fabricate. So here are some things to consider:

Determine their Names

When you christen your character think why they are called that. Is it a family name? A saint’s name? Who decided on it? Do they like their name or do they always use another? Do their parents insist on calling them James when they prefer Jim? In a crime novel, this could be a sneaky clue, because who would link jovial Jimmy to sinister Uncle James, mentioned only in chapter one? But, even if it’s not crucial to the plot, a name is instant backstory. A student told me that he and his brothers were all named after kings because their mother thought it meant they would be successful in life. Another was named after a football ground, presumably for the same reason. My real name is Domenica de Rosa which tells you that my family were Italian and Catholic, also that they had run out of inspiration after three daughters and so called me after a day of the week. Instant backstory. 

Remember you have to live with them

Jane Austen famously said that, in Emma, she was creating a heroine ‘whom no-one but myself would much like’. I think ‘but myself’ is significant. 90,000 words is a long time to spend with someone you dislike. Remember, also, that readers don’t have to like your characters but they do have to feel something for them. If you follow your character’s feet, you are following their life’s journey and so are the readers. Tension comes from caring if someone lives or dies. If readers don’t have any connection to your characters, your books will have no suspense, no matter how clever the plotting. 

Beware the German Funk Trap

I’m indebted to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce for this phrase. In short: never give your character interests instead of personality traits. Throwing a lot of quirky hobbies at a silhouette does not mean that it becomes a human being. For instance, where a character’s feet takes them in a story is in itself a unique quality. Musical taste is another unique quality. Could you sustain an interest in German funk for thirteen books? Choose a quality that you can relate to. I made Ruth a Bruce Springsteen fan for a reason. I never have to look up one of his lyrics because they are all written on my heart.

Remember their backstory

Kazuo Ishiguro said, ‘Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.’ Make sure that you know what happened to your characters before you met them. It doesn’t matter if you never use this backstory, your book will be richer for the knowledge.

Do the math(s)

Who would have thought that writing books required so much maths? I feel like I’m always subtracting a person’s birth date from their death date and coming up with -3. Make sure that your character is old enough to do the things necessary for the plot: marry, have children, drive a car etc. If you’re planning a series, it’s worth thinking about the age your protagonist will be at the start. This is not to say that you shouldn’t write about older characters. I’ve just written a book (The Postscript Murders) where many of the cast are over eighty. These people have lived a long time, they have lots of backstory.

Follow the feet

I didn’t know where Ruth was going so I had to follow her. When you have given your character a name, look down at their feet. Are they wearing stilettos or trainers? How far have they walked that day? They are going somewhere. Follow the feet. 

ELLY GRIFFITHS is the author of the Ruth Galloway and Brighton mystery series and the stand-alone novels The Stranger Diaries and The Postscript Murders. She is a recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, the Mary Higgins Clark Award, and the CWA Dagger in the Library Award. She lives in Brighton, England.

The post Follow the Feet appeared first on DIY MFA.

When I read Gail Carriger’s interpretation of the heroine’s journey, it struck a chord with me (imagine angelic chorus here). I thought that Instead of reviewing the structure and analyzing a genre story using the structure, as I did with the hero’s journey and the virgin’s promise, I’m going to let you know about Carriger’s approach to the heroine’s journey, its structure, and what it taught me about the stories I gravitate toward.

Carriger’s Background

Gail Carriger graduated university with an honors degree in archaeology, with minors in theology, geology, anthropology, philosophy, and classics. She is a hugely successful author, has taught classes, sat on panels, and discussed mythic books with readers, librarians, and booksellers.

Every time she mentioned the heroine’s journey, people asked her what she meant. So, she decided to put her years of learning and practice into a book.

Her Approach

After reviewing the hero’s journey for context, Carriger uses three core goddess-based ancient myths as the basis for an understanding of the heroine’s journey narrative beats and themes. She draws on Demeter from ancient Greek myth, Isis from ancient Egyptian myth, and Inanna from ancient Sumerian myth.

Then, she explores the critical, social, and academic disenfranchisement of the heroine’s journey in contrast to its commercial success. Carriger finishes with a breakdown of how the heroine’s journey can be used to create a compelling narrative in a variety of genres. I encourage you to pick up The Heroine’s Journey for yourselves if you want to dig into these last two points.

The Structure

Carriger presents the heroine’s journey beats in a simple list with italics to demark the major divisions. I’m going to add a little formatting to make the structure even clearer.

·         Act 1: The Descent

1.       Descent precipitated by a broken familial network.

2.       Heroine’s pleas are ignored, and she abdicates power.

3.       Withdrawal is involuntary.

4.       Family offers aid but no solution.

·         Act 2: The Search

5.       Heroine’s loss of family yields isolation/risk.

6.       She employs disguise/subversion and alters her identity.

7.       She appeals to and forms a surrogate network (found family).

8.       She visits the underworld, aided by friends/family.

·         Act 3: The Ascent

9.       Success in her search results in a new or reborn familial network.

10.     This ties to negotiation and compromise that will benefit all.

What I learned from The Heroine’s Journey

While Carriger’s heroine’s journey shares much with Kim Hudson’s virgin’s promise (family issues, disguise, emphasis on healing family rifts or newfound family, the heroine or virgin may be of either gender/any sexual identity), Hudson’s book, though I liked it better than Vogler’s (The Writer’s Journey), didn’t resonate with me in the same way as Carriger’s. I had to sit with the thought for a while before I figured out why.

Carriger’s beats are more accessible. They’re unambiguous. I didn’t have to work out what they might refer to. And I saw—so clearly—that this pattern is present in all my stories. Every. Single. One. I’ve been inadvertently trying to make heroes out of my heroines, and it’s caused all kinds of writerly problems. Carriger’s book was a revelation. It will help me to stay true to my stories, my characters, and their arcs.

Though the heroine’s journey is ideally suited to romance, mythic or fairy tale retellings, and middle grade and young adult stories, it can apply to many genres and categories. If readers are expecting a mythic hero’s journey, however, they may be disappointed when confronted by a heroine’s journey story. The key is to clearly signal what kind of story you’re writing and to set up reader expectations so they won’t feel betrayed. Again, I’ll defer to Carriger with respect to how to do this and invite you to read her book.

Over to You

I’ve shared my experience with The Heroine’s Journey in the hope that it might prove helpful to other writers of mythic journeys. If you’ve felt that your stories or characters are like square pegs trying to fit into hound holes (or, vice versa), you may be relying too heavily on a journey or archetypes that aren’t suited to the stories you want to tell.

Have you read a writing craft book or attended a workshop that shed a revelatory light on your work or process? If you have, and you’re willing to, please share your experience in the comments. You never know who it might help.

Until next time, keep speculating and see where it takes you!

Melanie Marttila creates worlds from whole cloth. She’s a dreamsinger, an ink alchemist, and an unabashed learning mutt. Her speculative short fiction has appeared in Bastion Science Fiction Magazine, On Spec Magazine, and Sudbury Ink. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, where she spends her days working as a corporate trainer. She blogs at https://www.melaniemarttila.ca and you can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Mythic Storytelling: The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger appeared first on DIY MFA.

About Sherry Thomas

USA Today bestseller Sherry Thomas is one of the most acclaimed historical romance authors writing today and a two-time RITA award winner.

The Interview

Sara Farmer: I love how Mrs. Treadles deals with the men in her office. It’s a scene that some might see as imposing modern sensibilities on the past. But I’ve learned lately that the Victorian era was much more fluid in terms of the role of women than has traditionally been thought. As the author of a series filled with strong Victorian women, can you speak to that? Has it been challenging to preserve the authenticity of the women in the series? 

Sherry Thomas: Long ago, to research a historical romance set in the Northwest Frontier of the British Raj (today’s Pakistan, near where Osama Bin Laden hid out for many years), I read a travelogue written by a Victorian female big game hunter. To this day, I don’t think I’ve come across a more resolute or more opinionated person. This woman knew exactly what she wanted and did exactly what she wanted. And the best thing?  Nowhere in her narrative did she ever give the impression that she was the only one of her kind, that she wasn’t “like the other women.” To the contrary, I had the feeling she knew plenty of women like her.

Now this woman was also a product of her time: casual prejudice rolled off her commentary. So while she might hold many beliefs we find abhorrent today, she didn’t have any doubts about her ability or her right to conduct her life as she wished. 

I think today’s audience, especially today’s American audience, sometimes forget how deeply Victorian women of a certain class believed in their own superiority. They were definitely strong-willed, lol, bolstered by all that class privilege. They’d directed servants and other lesser beings their entire lives; they might have paid lip service to the more traditionally “feminine” virtues, but there was very little meekness in them. 

This is what Mrs. Watson reminded Mrs. Treadles about, in the scene before Mrs. Treadles’s confrontation with the managers and directors of the company: the power she already had, by being the lawful owner of the enterprise. That she had the right to fire the men who ran the company.

So I’ve never found it remotely inauthentic to write strong women set in the Victorian times—hello, Irene Adler. What I do feel a twinge about, now and then, is how free my characters are from the other prejudices of their racist, colonial, homophobic, snobbish, and judgmental era. But then again, I am not writing for Victorians, but 21^st century readers and so I’ve decided that they are exceptions, women of true wisdom and clarity of view who understand what’s really important and which rules and prejudices exist only to reinforce existing social hierarchies.  

Sara: The cast of characters in the “Lady Sherlock” series is made up of societal “others,” even though some, like Lord Ingram, have learned to play the part. When I took a Writers’ League class with you a year ago, you mentioned that English is your second language. Did that experience inform the creation of your characters? Do you feel that your different perspective on the English language brings something special to your writing? Is there any aspect that consistently gives you trouble?

Sherry: It wasn’t until recently that I came to see how almost all my main and significant secondary characters in all my books have been others or outsiders in one sense or another. My immigrant experience must have wielded a large influence in that regard, but in fact, even before I left China, the experience of being different was already ingrained in my life. My parents were divorced when divorces were very rare. I grew up in the North of China, but my grandparents were originally from the South; my classmates were shocked that I didn’t know what yeast was since my diet was rice-based, whereas everyone else made their own steamed bread at home. 

I don’t feel that I have a different perspective on the English language than anyone else. I do consistently have trouble with things such as the subjunctive tense. If you hear me speak, I’m not always on the ball when it comes to subject-verb agreement. But overall, for nearly three decades now, English has been the language in which I think. I can judge its effect on my Chinese more readily than I can gauge the other way around.  

Sara: Are you similar to Charlotte? If not, is there a character you identify with?

Sherry: I love cake. I love cake and pastry and other desserts a lot. My powers of observation would impress no one, but like Charlotte I do have a cool disposition. I don’t excite easily and I don’t get anxious.

Sara: What inspired you to write a Sherlock story? How did you come up with this unique spin to set yourself apart in a market saturated with Sherlock? 

Sherry: It must have been around 2005 or 2006 when I read Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, in which a retired Sherlock Holmes takes on a young female apprentice whose brain works the exact same way his does. The Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books so enraptured me that for the first time in my life I thought to myself, I’d like to do something like this, to write my own take of a Sherlock Holmes story. 

But I’d never written a mystery, so I put that aspiration on the backburner. Fast forward to BBC Sherlock. The first season wowed me and the desire to write my own Sherlock Holmes story came roaring back. I figured if BBC Sherlock already moved Sherlock to the 21^st century and Elementary on CBS already made Watson a woman, then the only thing left to do was to make Sherlock a woman. I googled, found out that it hadn’t been done yet, and thought, well, why not me? 

It helped that by the time I proposed this series to my publishing house in 2014, I’d already written a mystery. To be sure it was also a fantasy, book 2 of my YA fantasy trilogy, but its central story question was very much one of “What happened?”  So, I was ready to tackle a real mystery.  

Sara: The plots have become increasingly twisty and are tied to series arcs that span multiple books. How do you construct these intricate plots? How do you keep track of it all? 

Sherry: Lol, I keep track by listening to all the previous books on audio before finalizing the next book. The close-linking of the stories happen, because I’m typically at a loss when I start a new book, so I look at what I’d done in the previous books to figure out where the big overall story should go.

And I’m not a natural plotter so my plots are often reverse-engineered. I don’t know exactly what should happen—I tend to have a better sense of where something does need to happen. So, I leave room for discoveries and secrets, etc., as I write my way forward, very much as if I’m a reader encountering this story for the first time, then when I finally figure the story out, I go back and patch everything together. 

Writing a story is not like chiseling in marble, one mistake and your statue would forever be without an arm. It is much more like making pottery from clay: You can crunch the whole thing down and restart and you can adjust as you go. 

Sara: How long did it take you to write your first novel? Do you have drawer novels?

Sherry: It took me about a year and a half to write my first novel. Years later, I would need another 10 months to tear the whole thing down and rewrite it from the ground up.

During my time as a historical romance writer, I’d already pulled out just about every drawer novel I had and rewritten them for publication. One remains. Not too long ago, I took a look at it and it was so bad I couldn’t even make it past the first page. So that one will forever stay where it belongs, in the dusty corners of my hard drive.

Sara Farmer lives in Austin, TX, with her husband, three kids, and two cats. When she’s not chasing kids and cats, she reads and writes mysteries. You can find her at www.kittymomma.com and on Twitter @avonlea79.

The post Interview with Sherry Thomas appeared first on DIY MFA.

1) Mental Strength

There is so much to say about Starr Carter in Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, but I’ll limit myself here to her mental strength. Broadly defined, mental strength refers to a person’s ability to deal effectively with pressure. After seeing her best friend shot by police, Starr Carter deals with a truly frightening amount of pressure from all sides as she processes what she saw and decides what to do about it. On top of everything, she has to keep living her life as one of the few black students at a wealthy, predominantly white school—which is not easy at the best of times.

Starr shows enormous strength not only by acting on what she believes in but by maintaining her composure long enough to figure out her beliefs in the first place. There are plenty of people—with intentions both good and bad—urging her to do one thing or another, but Starr ultimately makes her own decisions despite the weight of other people’s desires and expectations.

2) Emotional Strength

Although Ravenclaws are lauded for their intellectual ability, what I always notice and cherish about Luna Lovegood is her emotional strength. Emotionally strong people can identify and express their needs, and they don’t let setbacks or the meanness of others keep them from carrying on with their lives. Now, that doesn’t mean they never let their feelings get hurt. On the contrary, emotionally strong people are willing to feel pain and don’t try to logic away their emotions.

In the movie, when Luna discusses her mother’s death with Harry, she says very simply, “Yes, it was rather horrible. I do feel very sad about it sometimes.” Though the scene appears in the movie, not the book, it’s still very much in keeping with Luna’s character. Luna, like Harry, has known loss, and she is routinely teased and treated rather cruelly by many students. However, she stays true to herself and never loses her empathy or generosity.

3) Moral Strength

Moral strength can be defined as the fortitude to abide by one’s personal values, even when it’s hard. In Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small, Keladry of Mindelan, for example, shows great moral strength when she chooses to rescue her maid servant from a cruel prank instead of attending her final trials as a page. She knows missing these trials will mean repeating four miserable, difficult years as the only female page in the palace, but she takes her obligation to those under her care seriously and honors that obligation even at great personal cost to herself.

4) Intellectual Strength

Contrary to popular belief, intelligence is not determined by how much you know. Rather, intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. In defining intellectual strength, however, I would argue for an additional component: the ability to think critically but also openly and with humility, as Violet Baudelaire does to such great effect in her various adventures in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Violet sees possibilities where others see obstacles, and this flexibility of thought is in large part what makes her such an inspired inventor. However, Violet isn’t afraid to acknowledge the gaps in her knowledge and then work hard to fill them.

5) Physical Strength

Physical strength is perhaps the easiest for most to understand. Its definition is fairly straightforward: the measure of a person’s external force on an object using their muscles. In the realms of fiction, though, especially action or adventure based fiction, muscles rarely seem to come into play, and we don’t usually see the sweat and pit stains that go into building physical strength. Such omissions give the impression that physical strength is something you either have or you don’t, rather than something that can be gained through hard work.

One of my favorite things about R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War is that readers actually see Rin get stronger through diligent exercise (especially as one of her workouts is running up a mountain with a pig on her back) and then reap the fruits of her labor in a truly epic smackdown of her pretty-boy bully nemesis.

These five are by no means the only types of strength out there, and there are many nuances and subtypes of each to be considered. So go forth and think about which types of strength your characters (and you!) have already and which could use a little work. Then work it!

Kassandra Flamouri holds a degree in Music from the Sunderman Conservatory of Gettysburg College, which she uses to moonlight as a folk musician while earning a living as an SAT tutor. She is the author of The Roots Of Our Magic, a Greek-English bilingual collection of short stories inspired by the history, mythology, and folklore of Greece and her work has appeared online and in print in such venues as Flash Fiction Magazine, Timeless Tales Magazine, Fterota Logia, and more. Her own collection of strong girls, The Fruit of our Thorns, is currently available for pre-order on Amazon, due to be released on June 24th. For more information about her upcoming works and pre-order giveaways, visit her at www.flamourifiction.com. Subscribers to her mailing list receive a free story (both text and audio narration) from The Fruit of our Thorns as well as a monthly Pawsitivity email from Skye the rescue pup.

The post #5onFri: Five Ways to Craft Strong Female Characters appeared first on DIY MFA.

In today’s episode I bring you again live to ThrillerFest 2018! This time I’ve assembled a panel of bestselling thriller authors who all know how to write powerhouse female protagonists.

I am so excited to be speaking with Lisa Gardner, Jon Land, and Karin Slaughter, and sharing our panel discussion on the show!

As you’ll soon hear, not only do all these awesome authors craft strong female protagonists, but they know how to bring that strength to life on the page. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I am so glad to be able to share these authors’ amazing insights with you.

So listen in as we chat about how to craft strong female protagonists that will bring readers back to your books again and again.

In this episode Lisa, Jon, Karin and I discuss:

• The problem with writing strong female characters, and how to deal with it.
• Crafting the interplay between your character’s internal strength and the external conflict.
• Why growing with your character makes you a better writer.
• The different ways of defining strength, and how to show them in your characters.
• How our writing ripples out beyond the page.

Plus, plus all of these amazing authors’ #1 tip for writers.

About the Authors

Lisa Gardner is the #1 New York Times bestselling novelist of over a dozen thrillers.  A former research analyst with a Boston consulting firm, she now enjoys interviewing very cool investigative and forensic experts to craft even more diabolical novels.  A past winner of International Thriller Writers Best Novel of the Year for The Neighbor, as well as ITW’s Silver Bullet Award for Philanthropy, she is currently at work on her latest thriller in the mountains of New Hampshire. Her latest release Look For Me is now available. To connect with Lisa check out her website at www.LisaGardner.com, and listen to her solo episode on DIY MFA Radio at DIYMFA.com/086.

Jon Land is the USA Today bestselling author of 44 books, including 9 titles in the critically acclaimed, award-winning Caitlin Strong series, the most recent of which, Strong to the Bone, won the 2017 American Book Fest Award for Mystery/Suspense. He recently published A Date With Murder, his first entry in the Murder She Wrote series that he’s taken over.  And last year he also teamed with ThrillerMaster Heather Graham on The Rising, the first in a groundbreaking sci-fi series. To connect with Jon check out his website at www.jonlandbooks.com.

Karin Slaughter is one of the world’s most popular and acclaimed storytellers. Published in 120 countries with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her eighteen novels include the Grant County and Will Trent books, as well as the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and the instant New York Times bestselling novels Pretty Girls and The Good Daughter. Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, Karin Slaughter lives in Atlanta. Her standalone novels Cop Town, The Good Daughter, and newest release Pieces of Her are in development for film and television. To connect with Karin check out her website at www.karinslaughter.com.

About the Books

These are all such wonderful books and we hope you’ll help support these fabulous authors. If you decide to check out one (or all!) of these, we hope you’ll do so via the Amazon affiliate links below. This means that with every purchase DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. It’s a great way to support these debut authors and DIY MFA at the same time. Thank you for being awesome!

Look For Me by Lisa Gardner

In #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner’s latest twisty thrill ride, Detective D. D. Warren and Flora Dane of Find Her, return in a race against the clock to either save a young girl’s life…or bring her to justice.

The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four of them savagely murdered, one—a sixteen-year-old girl—missing. Was she lucky to have escaped? Or is her absence evidence of something sinister? Detective D. D. Warren is on the case—but so is survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether as victim or suspect, is silently pleading, Look for me.

Strong to the Bone by Jon Land

Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong takes on a gang of neo-Nazis in Strong to the Bone.

1944: Texas Ranger Jim Strong investigates a triple murder inside a Nazi POW camp in Texas.

The Present: His daughter, fifth generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong, finds herself pursuing the killer her father never caught in the most personal case of her career―a conspiracy stretching from that Nazi POW camp to a modern-day neo-Nazi gang.

A sinister movement has emerged from the shadows of history, determined to undermine the American way of life. Its leader, Armand Fisker, has an army at his disposal, a deadly bio-weapon, and a reputation for being unbeatable. But he’s never taken on the likes of Caitlin Strong and her outlaw lover, Cort Wesley Masters.

To prevent an unspeakable cataclysm, Caitlin and Cort Wesley must win a war the world thought was over.

Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter

What if the person you thought you knew best turns out to be someone you never knew at all…?

Andrea knows everything about her mother, Laura. She knows she’s spent her whole life in the small beachside town of Belle Isle; she knows she’s never wanted anything more than to live a quiet life as a pillar of the community; she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life. Because we all know our mothers, don’t we?

But all that changes when a trip to the mall explodes into violence and Andrea suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura. Because it turns out that before Laura was Laura, she was someone completely different. For nearly thirty years she’s been hiding from her previous identity, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. But now she’s been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again.

The police want answers and Laura’s innocence is on the line, but she won’t speak to anyone, including her own daughter. Andrea is on a desperate journey following the breadcrumb trail of her mother’s past. And if she can’t uncover the secrets hidden there, there may be no future for either one of them.

Link to Episode 213

(Right-click to download.)

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 213: Writing Strong Female Protagonists — LIVE from ThrillerFest 2018 appeared first on DIY MFA.