Young Adult Fiction Round-Up
With so much change for the better happening out there in the world – the #MeToo movement, the March for our Lives gun control rallies, the rise in LGBTQ+ books and authors of color in YA literature, to name a…
Category: Publishing
The Novel Pitcher’s Playbook
Baseball pitchers rarely rely on a single pitch. They mix things up with fast balls, changeups, curve balls, knuckle balls, sliders, sinkers, and cutters. They consider who they are pitching to, how many strikes they have, how many outs, how…
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…