Writer 911: What’s Your Emergency?
This past week I’ve heard from a lot of writer friends who are having a tough time, mostly with their writing. As one friend put it, “hard to write with all this treason.” It got me to imagining a 911-type…
Interview with Madeline Miller, Author of Circe
Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012), a novel that won the Orange Prize for Fiction and had me hooked from page one. On the surface it was a retelling of the famous warrior’s life,…
Jumping the Cut: Writing Transitional Scenes in the Netflix and Twitter Age
Ever since the first movie reel rolled, pundits have decried the end of the novel as we know it. To be sure, the novel has changed remarkably in the last fifty years and yet we only need to look to…
Interview with Louise Miller, author of The Late Bloomers’ Club
Louise Miller’s second novel The Late Bloomers’ Club is a welcome return to Guthrie, Vermont, home to the Sugar Maple Inn, fine fiddle music, contra dances, and the apple pies of her debut, The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living. People Magazine says “you’ll…
11 Writing Tips for Poor People
I appreciate writing tips from fellow writers. I love seeing how other people function and how they hope their successful patterns might be successful for someone else. But while the bulk of the advice out there is helpful, meaningful, and…
Writing Middle Grade Fiction: What I Wish I’d Known
I didn’t plan to write for kids. My current middle grade novel, Beastly, began as a book for adults. After a few years it turned into a YA novel, and a few years later, it dropped to middle grade. Since…