By Guest Contributor Kate Leary. In early September I finished the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on for a year. My kids were spending the week with their grandparents in Albany and my husband was backpacking with…
You finally finished writing your YA book! You’ve polished and repolished your manuscript until it positively shines. Now what? If you’re like me, you continue to tweak and revise while sending it out to agents, collecting those rejection slips, sighing,…
I have a thing for magical worlds. Every time Lucy opens that wardrobe, brushes past the musty fur coats, and walks into Narnia, I get a thrill. I like my escapes big. In psychology, I wrote about transcendent experiences. In…
It’s that time of year again. Every Halloween, my brother-in-law replaces his inner front door with a coffin door. He watches through a peephole as trick-or-treaters approach and at just the right moment jumps out of the door—Boo! Some kids…
I love autumn—the sweet smell of wood-smoke, pumpkins everywhere, trees laden with ripe apples and pears, the radiant bursts of red and orange that make me go wow on a regular basis. As Keats said, autumn truly is the “Season…
Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies elbowed out some of its competition last Wednesday when the National Book Award announced its 2015 finalists, but of any writer I know, I don’t expect such adulation to go to Groff’s head. I first…