How To Write When Your Father Is Dying
You will sit down to write on a Sunday morning. Your final manuscript is due to your Incubator class in 22 days. The phone will ring. Your heart will sink at the Maine area code. It will be your father’s…
Communication Breakdown: When reading body language is a necessity
Just over a year ago, in a paroxysm of post-election whythehellnottery, my wife and I packed up our books and moved from Boston, MA to Madrid, Spain. My Spanish was shaky at best, and still is. I spend most days in…
Your Writing, Your Business: Why You Should Hire a CPA
Equipped with TurboTax and coffee, the world of writers went forth on April 17th (why did you wait so long?) to report and value their last year of work as freelancers, teachers, you name it. I’m talking tax returns, of…
Ten Tips for Losing a Hundred Pages
Writers think about word counts the way dieters think about calories. By the time I finished my YA novel, Half in Love with Death, I’d reduced it from 97,000 to 90,000 words, and I thought it was pretty slim and…
How I Changed All My Writing Habits
It is a truth universally acknowledged that one when becomes a writer paid (minimally, but paid!) for writing, one chucks all of one’s precious notions about craft and art and motivation out the window that has needed replacing for three…
You Should Read This: In Praise of the Sincere Recommendation
“I tried to like it,” she wrote in a text message. “But I just can’t.” What? I thought. How can that be? That novel had ripped me to shreds. In a good way. It had been with perfect confidence that…