Sometimes novels are twenty years in the making. For our 2025 alum Elizabeth Kemp, something she witnessed on a cruise decades ago needled in her memory and after years of scribbling ideas on receipts, she sat down to write her novel during the pandemic. Writing can be like that—the writer as observer, taking in the world and seeing the anomalies, wanting to explain them, or explore them!

I was lucky enough to meet Elizabeth at the San Francisco Writers Conference in February 2023, when she booked an 8-minute consultation with me. She followed up from our meeting with the first twenty pages of her manuscript and I was hooked, ready to read more—and help edit it toward publication. In October 2025, her debut novel, Tread Lightly, was published by Sibylline Press. Sibylline is a small press, publishing books exclusively by women over fifty. They take unsolicited manuscripts, so while Elizabeth had reached out to literary agents, she eventually tried this route on her own, and within weeks, Sibylline came back to her with an offer.

We talked about her path to publication in this Book Journey, including getting a blurb from a fellow NCWR alum, Carinn Jade! I hope you enjoy the listen!

Here’s a bit about Tread Lightly from the publisher:

A stay-at-home mom with a past navigates a murder in Silicon Valley...When a lifeguard’s body is found at the local pool where Tierney lap swims daily, she is pulled back into the life she thought she had left behind when she was a member of the Crisis Intervention Squad in Dublin, Ireland. A former hostage negotiator turned stay-at-home mom, her move to Silicon Valley for her husband’s job offered the contrast of a calm, domestic life. But this murder investigation disrupts all that, connecting to an event in her past, and threatening to overwhelm her.On the domestic front, the cliques at her kindergartener’s new private school aren’t making it easy for her to fit in either. This ‘fish out of water’ story is a domestic thriller set amid a backdrop of the tech industry’s 2007 stock-option backdating scandal.As Tierney struggles with survivor’s guilt from her previous employment and wrestles with the motherhood/career balancing act, there’s still a murder to be solved. And in helping solve it, Tierney discovers the assumptions we make about people can be completely incorrect—even when those people are ourselves.

Happy listening, reading, and writing,

Heather

founder + director, Northern California Writers’ Retreat

I really like knowing my neighbors, and this particular neighbor I met in 2016. Alka and I share a fence line, and in May, I can pick the most delicious plums from her tree, which overhangs into our garden.

I’ve been fortunate to watch Alka Joshi go from writer to published author—four times over! Alka’s debut novel The Henna Artist was published in a bleak moment: March 2020. But she made the most of her virtual book tour, and has gone on to speak to over 1000 book clubs in the past five years! It’s such a joy to meet writers early in their careers and be on the ground floor of their transformation—it’s something I especially love about running the retreat.

In this podcast, Alka and I talk about her journey to publish The Henna Artist (hint: there were a LOT of drafts), the original title (reveal: Alka is bad at titles!), and how AI can never create a backstory as authentic as your own (thank goodness). We also discussed Alka’s marketing background and how that has been instrumental to her understanding the importance of saying yes and how word of mouth moves far more copies than any advertising campaign ever could.

I hope you enjoy listening to Alka’s inspiring story!

Thanks for your interest!

Heather

Northern California Writers’ Retreat, founder + director

Enjoy the conversation with our 2020 Author-in-Residence, Jasmine Guillory! Jasmine is a New York Times bestselling author of nine novels including The Wedding Date, the Reese's Book Club selection The Proposal, and Flirting Lessons. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Bon Appetit, and Time, and she is a frequent book contributor on The Today Show.

Northern California Writers' Retreat is a juried fiction retreat held four times a year in Carmel Valley. Join us for four nights and five days of writing, workshopping, yoga, live piano music, delicious food and wine, plus community and connection!

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