Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, Paperback

In her years of teaching, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett has found aspiring writers (especially women) blocked not by fear of the blank page but by the lack of time. Finding even an hour, much less a day, free of work, children, or chores can seem impossible. But you don't need an hour. Start looking for just fifteen minutes a day--minutes spent stalled in traffic, waiting for water to boil, stuck on hold--and DeMarco-Barrett will help you turn them into productive sessions that get and keep your creativity flowing. In short, inspiring chapters, she offers classroom-tested exercises and innovative techniques for generating ideas, as well as advice from well-known authors. Give her fifteen minutes: She'll ignite your pen and help you to become the writer you have always wanted to be.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett's published works include Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004; 11th printing), a Los Angeles Times bestseller and winner of the 2005 American Society of Journalists and Authors book award. Her short story, "Crazy for You," published in Orange County Noir (Akashic, 2010), was chosen for USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series (Akashic, 2013). Her short fiction has been published in the Oyez Review, The Big Click, and Radius. Essays and articles have seen print in anthologies as well as The Authors Guild Bulletin, The Writer, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, Writer's Digest, Toronto Sun, San Jose Mercury News, Orange Coast Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. She's a member of the Authors Guild, PEN, American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Sisters in Crime Orange County Chapter, where she's incoming president for 2018. She hosts "Writers on Writing," a public radio show on KUCI-FM (broadcasting out of UC-Irvine) and in 2009 founded the Pen on Fire Speaker Series in Corona del Mar, a bi-monthly salon featuring noted authors, editors, and literary agents. In 2011, she was named #1 Literary Magnet by Orange Coast Magazine, a glossy metropolitan regional serving Orange County, California. . DeMarco-Barrett has taught creative writing for 20-plus years. For twelve of those years she taught at UC-Irvine where she received a Distinguished Instructor award. Since 2005, she has taught at Gotham Writer's Workshop. She is a former board member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and served as the Southern California Chapter president for five years. From 2000 to 2012, she served as editor of The ASJA Monthly, the official publication for ASJA. Before that, she was travel editor for The Local Concierge, a Southern California travel magazine. For three years she wrote the "Women's Business" column for OC Metro, a business magazine distributed in Orange County, California. She lives in coastal Orange County one hour south of Los Angeles with her jazz and blues musician husband and son, and two cats.