“I always planned to be a writer. As a little girl, I wanted to be Lois Lane,” Mary Kay Andrews told me. “At one point I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll write books,’ but girls from St. Pete didn’t write books…” So Andrews, now a bestselling author with more than 25 novels under her belt, became a journalist straight out of college. She spent the next 11 years secretly trying to write her way out of the newsroom, but that time on the Cops and Courts beat and then in Features taught her

This we know: lots of movies are based on books. It’s a fairly common debate - which was better? Did the movie get it right? Was the author involved? With Indianapolis, the definitive account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the process happened a little differently. In this case, filmmaker Sara Vladic had written a screenplay, but she was told the movie needed to be based on a book. “I remember reading one sentence about the Indianapolis as a middle schooler and think

At Alex Kershaw’s book The First Wave accomplishes many things, but perhaps the most important is its “out and out celebration of sacrifice and courage” made by the first wave of American soldiers on the beaches at Normandy in World War II. As the 75th anniversary of D-Day approaches, he said he had a very specific purpose in writing the novel. “This story was written to celebrate the stars,” Kershaw said. “I wanted to take the people who were extraordinary and tell their sto

Michael Knight hadn’t planned on becoming a writer, or at least not as a career. He wrote poems and novels throughout his childhood, but as he was getting ready to graduate from college, he (somewhat resignedly) applied to law school. “I always thought writers were sort of magicians, that they knew things the rest of us didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t realize [writing] was a thing you could do.” Fortunately, a professor encouraged him to pursue his graduate degree in creative wri