Under Pressure
People used to ask, “When is your next book due?” and I would laugh, self-consciously, because I didn’t have deadlines. I wasn’t a writer who had contracts or editors waiting for me to produce anything. In those bygone days, I…
Category: Craft Discussion
World Building: What Time Is It?
From Hogwarts to Whoville every fiction writer constructs a world. It’s an artful business even when the settings are based on real places. The best ones are indelible.
Failing Beautifully
I assigned myself this blog because Life had taken me away from Art and I needed a way back to the page. I thought if I had a deadline I’d produce. And I have produced—many many badly written glib little…
When the Universal is Just Mainstream: 3 Writing Rules That Fail Marginalized Authors
(Note: This rant was originally inspired [or should I say, rekindled] by this Grub Street blog post by Suzahn Ebrahimian.) It was frustrating when I first got into more “serious” fiction writing, for I was a good little student. I…
An Interview with Stephanie Gayle, Author of Idyll Fears
Stephanie Gayle is the author of the Thomas Lynch mystery series, which includes Idyll Threats and Idyll Fears, out today. Her first novel, My Summer of Southern Discomfort, was one of Redbook magazine’s Top Ten Summer Reads, and her short fiction…
Writing the Murky Middle: How Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Can Help
I was floundering in the Murky Middle of my novel. You know that place—the one that happens after you’ve sent your hero off to find her heart’s desire, but before she actually gets it. Right, that place—the big, awful middle…