Thank you for checking out my coaching services. I would love to help you create your best work. Why? Because writers and writing are my passion. And because I want you to have the same success I have. Besides books of memoir and biography, I have written countless op-eds, essays, editorials and news stories. They have appeared in publications and on radio stations around the world, including the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, Newsday, the London Times magazine, NPR's All Things Considered, the BBC, and so many more. For decades I was a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Times, then an opinion writer and editor at USA TODAY. 

 

I became a book writing coach because of a life-changing experience.  My husband, a once-brilliant Washington Post foreign correspondent, was descending into dementia. Towards the end of one of our last vacations he turned to me and said he knew he could not write the memoir he had begun.  Time had run out on his brain. I promised I would write it for him. We had met as Cold War Moscow correspondents, and it was my story too, one of love enduring through injustice. A wonderful editor coached me as I wrote the memoir -- even though, as a lifelong journalist, opinion writer, editor and nonfiction author, I thought I already knew how to write one. How wrong I was! He taught me memoir's essential rules, structure and storytelling as I wrote The Inconvenient Journalist.

 

As he coached me, I understood that memoir book structure follows similar rules to the editorials, op-eds and essays I had written for decades. I made it my mission to develop strategies to teach these to other writers like you so that you, too, could achieve the success I have. I also trained for almost two years to become a certified book coach in memoir, fiction and nonfiction. So what, exactly, is a book coach? Think of me as the writing version of a sports or life coach.  I will be by your side, part editor, part mentor, giving you guidance, feedback, cheering your progress, always telling you the truth about your writing and keeping you on track.

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More biographical details: My life and work have taken me all

over the world. Born in the UK, I grew up in Uganda and Kenya, and studied at the universities of Lancaster (UK) and Paris. I have worked in the UK, Spain, France, Switzerland, Russia, Taiwan, China, the former Yugoslavia and the USA, mostly as a foreign or war correspondent gathering facts, listening to stories, understanding situations, and writing for vast audiences. I speak several languages. My home is just outside Washington DC. I would love to be your book coach on your writing journey, to teach you all I know and to help you achieve your writing goals.

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