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…
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…
Making it Work: 4 Tips for Squeezing Writing between Job, Kids, Life
Some weeks before my artist friend Vicki Paret’s baby arrived, she stretched nine canvases of equal size. She gridded nine rectangles on each canvas. Eighty-one rectangles would form one epic painting. She worked methodically, left to right, top to bottom….
YA Wednesday: Parents in YA — Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em?
When I discover that one or both parents are dead in a YA novel, I don’t feel sad. I think, oh no, here we go again. As 10 Worn-out Cliches in YA states, “The death toll of parents in YA…
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: Lessons from One-Star Reviews, Mid-Career Author Advice, Slut Shaming in Romance, Spreading the Book Love, and Bookish Street Art
I told myself I wouldn’t write about winter weather so much this year. But here we are on the verge of another snowstorm. Instead of bemoaning the bitter cold, I’m trying to focus on the benefits: lots of time to…