Category: Women
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My Writing Life: 10
The 2010s were a new and very different time for me as a writer, in three important ways. First, I dipped my toes into the world of self-publishing . . . and then I jumped into the enterprise head-first. Because I’ve blogged about most of my self-published books before, I won’t dwell on them. But…
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My Writing Life: 6
In 1977 Contemporary Books published my first novel, She’s on First. I’ve published a lot of books since, but you need not fear that I’m going to write a blog about each of them. That would take me to something like “My Writing Life: 147,” and I suspect I would lose many (if not all!)…
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My Writing Life: 2
After that initial short story I wrote in high school, my next foray into fiction came about fifteen years later, when I decided to start writing novels. I had plenty of plots in mind and just needed to decide which one to start with. At the time I was working as a typesetter for the…
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The F Words and She’s on First
For the last year, as I’ve been marketing The F Words, I’ve often thought about She’s on First. I suppose that the immediate reason I think of the two books together is that they are, for me, both firsts. She’s on First is the first novel I published (1987.) And The F Words (2021) is…
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Women at Play: A Square Book
My first novel, She’s on First, was a baseball novel, published in 1987. After I spent 1987 promoting She’s on First, I decided I would write a true account of women in baseball. I started researching this subject in January of 1988 and figured I would finish by December. Wrong! It took me four years,…
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Character Names: Associations
One of the things beginning writers are warned against is starting multiple character names with the same letter of the alphabet. That’s because readers will inevitably get confused as to who the character is. In other words, don’t have a David and a Derrick in the same book. I failed to heed this warning when…
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Sharing My Research Notes
From 1988-1992 I spent every day of the year researching the story of women who had played baseball in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as part of that research I ended up with 8,000 or so sheets of paper that I stored in files, which I stored in file-pockets, which I stored in my…
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He Traded Rose Gacioch
Rose Gacioch’s parents emigrated from Poland to the United States in the early 1900s. A member of the immigrant working class, Rose Gacioch did not speak perfect English. This is what happened to her as a result. He Traded Rose Gacioch He traded Rose Gacioch,he did, the Presidentof the South Bend Blue Sox,after just one…
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Women at Play and Libraries
In my previous blog I wrote about my best-known book, Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, which is now available as an ebook. First published twenty-five years ago by Harcourt, Women at Play went into a second printing, and then, eventually, it went out of print. But it has had a long…
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Women at Play: 25th Anniversary Edition
For the past several years I’ve posted a free chapter from one of my books as part of my New Year’s blog. That book has been Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples, Plus Dead Bodies. But this year’s giveaway chapter comes from my best-known book, Women at Play: The Story of Women…
Barbara Gregorich 