Making Amends for Getting it Wrong
I’m going to be honest: I’m a little afraid right now. As I approach this third rail, know that I do so from a position of humility. This is one ignoramus’s developing story of how I’m learning not to be…
Category: Research
When Personality Gets in the Way of Character
Like many writers, I’m quite introverted. I like quiet. I like a room of my own, a state of low stimulus equilibrium. I’m a listener more than a talker; a watcher more than a doer; risk averse, rather than a…
The Solo Writing Retreat
Ah! The idea of one solid week of writing, and nothing but writing, kept me going for months. I had booked this week away back in June, just after returning from my annual four-day retreat with my writing group. My…
An Interview with Juliette Fay, author of The Tumbling Turner Sisters
Juliette Fay’s fourth book, The Tumbling Turner Sisters, is the story of four girls who try their hand as an acrobatic act in 1919 vaudeville, in an effort to save their poverty stricken family (Gallery Books 2016). Ultimately it is a…
On Rewriting
Here’s a tip for all aspiring authors: if you can survive rewriting your work, again and again, without collapse, without quitting, you will see your work published. Rewriting is often what separates the unpublished from the published. I attended The…
The Thrill of Discovery, The Agony of the Fact
I decided to write a historical novel because I wanted to get completely out of my day-to-day life and contemporary everything—terrorism, the failure of capitalism, modern marriage, childhood and adolescence, politics, racism, climate change, you name it. Did I have…