So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is just around the corner and this could be your chance to finally get that novel, or at least 50,000 words of it, written. The result might be highly flawed or rough, but just reaching…
I recently returned from living as my protagonist. To match my novel of historical fiction about queer pirates, I sailed for a week on a wooden tall ship from Boston to New York City. It was my 30th birthday gift…
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…
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? 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….