Confessions of a Story Slam Winner
I am sitting in the audience waiting to see if Steve Almond will call my name. After years of listening to the Moth Radio Hour and going to Story Slams, I have finally gotten up the nerve to put my…
Category: Writing
Friday Feast: Query Letters, Kindness and Conventions, Pop Culture References, Racial Invisibility and Erasure in the Writing Workshop, and the Value of Not Writing
How do you write an amazing query letter? With pizza, alcohol, and friends, of course! At least that was our hope at last night’s “Query-a-Thon,” where a group of Novel Incubator alumni and current students convened to tackle that first hurdle on…
Point of View: Omniscient
“Partway through writing my first novel, I had a terrifying realization: I needed an omniscient narrator.” -Celeste Ng, Dead Darlings post April 7, 2014. Writing a novel is all about making a series of decisions that add up to a…
Friday Feast: Book Sales, Writer Gestation, Unreliable Narrators, Unrealistic Tropes, and the Importance of Writing Carefree Blackness™
This week, I’m indulging in a feast of cold meds and Advil PM thanks to an awesome cold that’s making its way around Boston, which makes it hard to muster any energy to revise the many first drafts hanging around…
Fireside Stories
Twenty years ago, I moved to Boston, not because I had any plans but because a friend did and I didn’t have anything better to do. When she asked me if I’d like to come along for the ride, I…
YA Wednesday: Is it Okay to Say #$**x! in YA?
Full disclosure: I swear a lot. When my kids were little they learned some real doozies from me (that I can’t quote here), and made up a few good ones of their own. My personal favorite was when my daughter…