The blogosphere has been abuzz over a six-figure deal for the rights to a year-old self-published debut novel, The Cruelty, by Scott Bergstrom. The firestorm began with a November 24th article in Publisher’s Weekly, “YA Debut Gets Six Figure Deal,…
Happy first Friday of December. All those tasks put off last week have to be dealt with this week. On top of workload grumpiness, I suspect everyone is super cranky this week because they’re off their normal feeding schedules, like…
In her recent essay, “On Pandering,” Claire Vaye Watkins records the shock of discovering that she wrote, primarily, for old white men, members of the literati like Franzen, Roth, et al whose approval she sought and to whose tastes and…
I’m going to keep this short so you can get back to your turkey, your pumpkin pie, your pinot noir, your attempts to ignore your racist uncle, back to the bathroom where you hide to regain your composure and your…
This past week was one of those times when communicating anything to do with my writing felt selfish and small. With bombs going off and refugees fleeing and people on social media acting frustratingly unkind, my fingers froze at sharing a…
Everyone has to do research from time to time. When one reader exclaimed of my early sprawling draft, set in the 1930s and ‘40s: “You sure know a lot about a lot!” I did not take it as a compliment….