Meet the Author: Lynne Cantwell

Author Lynne Cantwell
Author Lynne Cantwell

Lynne Cantwell grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. She worked as a broadcast journalist for many years; she has written for CNN, the late lamented Mutual/NBC Radio News, and a bunch of radio and TV news outlets you have probably never heard of, including a defunct wire service called Zapnews. Lynne’s education includes a journalism degree from Indiana University, a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a paralegal certificate. She lives near Washington, DC.

Lynne says her greatest strength as a writer is in writing first drafts. “Most of my broadcast journalism experience was in radio. When you have ten minutes to write a five-minute newscast, you just don’t have time for a lot of revision. Also, radio news departments are typically so small that you don’t have an editor – nobody else looks over your copy before you read it on the air. So you learn to write clean copy. It may not be deathless prose, but it will get you through your newscast without generating outraged calls from your listeners. Usually.” Continue reading “Meet the Author: Lynne Cantwell”

Attached to life at all four corners by Rosanne Dingli (Redux)

[Contributing author Rosanne Dingli is experiencing technical difficulties, possibly as a result of inadvertently downloading a virus while watching the popular though highly illegal Author Deathmatch web-TV show. This is an encore performance of her first post for Indies Unlimited. — ed.]

Fiction is a funny thing … that fiction authors take very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it can take over their lives, and depress, frighten, enthuse, or gladden them. Fiction has the power to mystify its creators; dash their hopes, fill them with wonder, and douse them with the kind of despondency that is hard to shake.

Fiction Stacks
Image by chelmsfordpubliclibrary via Flickr

For some it is storytelling; for others, a tool to incorporate who they are as people with what the world would like to hear from them. For a few it is a curse; for many, the only joy in their lives. Fiction, if it is in your life, can be the source of the whole gamut of emotions. It is a rare author who has no deep emotive life. There seems to be a prerequisite to be able to feel events, scenes and snatches from real life in a sensitive way, if one is to turn them into stories that will move readers. One must be capable of melancholia and ecstasy. Otherwise, how can one create them, to be felt by others? All stories are to do with life. Even the ones built on the most outlandish science, on fantasy, on improbability, need to be anchored in some way to human life as we know it. In fact, it is rather hard to move so far away from life to write something that is beyond the ken of even the most intrepid reader with the wildest imagination. Continue reading “Attached to life at all four corners by Rosanne Dingli (Redux)”