Unpenned: Turning the Novel Loose
“There comes a time when you have to let the novel go.” “It will never be perfect.” “You can’t fiddle with it forever.” Yadda, yadda. So goes the writing advice about when to finally set a novel free in the…
“There comes a time when you have to let the novel go.” “It will never be perfect.” “You can’t fiddle with it forever.” Yadda, yadda. So goes the writing advice about when to finally set a novel free in the…
Every revision has its own character. There’s the first messy revision, during which you try to cull from the confusing mass of pages some sort of a narrative. The second brings with it massive structural changes (in my case, cutting…
“Writer’s Block” is a lot like climate change: despite mounting evidence that it does, in fact, exist, some of us are still deep in denial. Until recently, I believed that provided a writer shows up to the desk every day,…
Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Figures from online retailer…
I recently had the good fortune (trying to keep it positive) to find myself without a job. After the shock of being unemployed was over, I became grateful for the time off. I decided to take the summer and work…
Bad juju comes to most of us, and sometimes it comes all at once and sometimes it is a staccato of bad news, one thing, another thing, another thing, another. My response to trouble used to be assume professional stance at…