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…
Category: Writing Advice
World Building: What Time Is It?
From Hogwarts to Whoville every fiction writer constructs a world. It’s an artful business even when the settings are based on real places. The best ones are indelible.
Writing Every Day: The 100 Day Challenge
Writing every day? Forget it. That’s what best-selling male writers do while their wives do everything else. Or so I thought until the 100 Day Challenge. The Challenge started at the end of GrubStreet’s spring Muse and the Marketplace Conference….
How to Read Your Work Aloud in Public
I know many, many writers who get terrified by the idea of reading aloud to an audience. But readings are part of the business of post-published writing, especially in the world of novels. Readings give you an opportunity to sell…
Find Your Chair Pose: How Yoga Helps Me Write
Often I feel like I’m stealing time from everything else I should be doing to write. Or else, I’m living the nightmare of an “I’d rather be fishing” bumper sticker. In this metaphor fishing = writing. It’s a constant trade-off…
Failing Beautifully
I assigned myself this blog because Life had taken me away from Art and I needed a way back to the page. I thought if I had a deadline I’d produce. And I have produced—many many badly written glib little…