Birthing Babies, Birthing Books
Once again, I find myself gestating two babies: my book and an actual human child, currently two weeks out from D-Day. This happened two years ago too, smack in the middle of the Novel Incubator. I went to class one…
Category: Revision
Pow! Zap! What Short Stories Can Teach Us About Writing Novels
Novels are my second love, the roast beef in my diet. And I relish the meal. But I down short stories like chocolates. For their density. For their Pow! of feeling and their electric insight. I’d venture to say that…
Friday Feast: Tolstoy’s Mac & Cheese, Taipei’s Bookstore, Rejection, Success, and Rewrites
There are some great links this week, but all I can think about is macaroni and cheese. Homemade mac and cheese. Kraft mac and cheese. Mac and cheese with breadcrumbs, hot dogs, tuna … Nothing else matters. You can find…
This Draft Sucks Part II — Take A Break
This Draft Sucks – Part I ends with the following advice: if you think your draft sucks, put it away. Don’t look at it for a month and hope when you return with fresh eyes it won’t suck as badly…
Getting to Know You: POV Lessons from Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem once said in an interview that he wrote early drafts of Motherless Brooklyn, a first-person novel from the POV of a character with Tourette’s, in third person. The interviewee was shocked. And in disbelief. But Lethem insisted he…
Writer Resolutions for 2015
At the end of 2013, I asked Dead Darlings contributors and Novel Incubator alums to share the best thing they did for themselves in the previous year. In 2014, two contributors published their debut novels, two contributors sold their novels,…