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: The Writing Life
Why? Why? Why?
I need to finish my outline. I need to take the trash out. I need to be spending time researching. I need to do the laundry. I need to revise that chapter. I need to go to the grocery store. These to-dos buzz around my head like mosquitoes on…
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…
Writing Life
Sit in front of your computer for hours. If you only write one word, that’s ok, you wrote one word. Subscribe to lots of literary magazines so that you can tell people that you subscribe to a lot of literary…
Writing Awe
In April I hiked through Zion National Park. I stood gape-mouthed, staring at the burnt orange, gold, and greens in the walls of a canyon so deep it made me dizzy. Layers of sedimentary rock rose up in swirling stripes…