Category: Publishing

Potluck Advice: The Search for an Agent

On a recent winter night—dark but not stormy—a dozen writers at various points in their novels gathered over chicken pot pie, roasted vegetables, spinach salad with grapefruit, and chocolate cookies to swap stories and advice about finding a good agent….

Good Times, Bad Times

An inauspicious anniversary recently passed; it’s been a full year since I signed a contract with a literary agent to represent my novel. The day marked twelve months of suspense, frustration, and heartbreak at rejection emails worded with such tact…

Dead Book Walking

I’m writing a book that will probably never get published. Not because it’s a bad book, necessarily, though it may be, but because it’s a book about people trying to escape the kind of broken country we might end up…

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…

Debut Author Debrief

I’m about a month out from the publication of my debut novel, Cottonmouths, and let me tell you, it’s been a whirlwind. But my whirlwind is definitely different from other authors’ whirlwinds because as I’ve mentioned before, we’re all special…