What are Your Intentions?
Just as the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the path to my recycle bin is littered with fuzzy intentions. One of these scenarios tells a complete story. The other is just a pile of garbage.
Category: Agents
On Rewriting
Here’s a tip for all aspiring authors: if you can survive rewriting your work, again and again, without collapse, without quitting, you will see your work published. Rewriting is often what separates the unpublished from the published. I attended The…
Friday Feast: The Literary Wilderness; The Slut-Shaming of Romance Novels; How to Publish a Book; On Solitude, Compromise, and Publishing That First Novel; And Tips on Writing Book Reviews
My big deadline this week entailed completing and submitting my author questionnaire. In this document, you outline some basic facts, like your name (important), publishing and media contacts (most important, which is sad, because I have none), and digital outreach…
Three Things I’m Glad I Did Before My Debut Sold
If you decide to go with traditional publishing, there’s very little you can control once you hit Submit on your query. You’ll feel jittery. Hooray. That’s normal. You’ll feel self-absorbed and needy and desperate. Super. Also normal. But I’m here…
Friday Feast: An Open Letter to Authors at Bookstore Tables, How Rejection Shaped One Writer, How Novelists Recover History’s Marginalized Heroes, Donald Ray Pollock’s 5 Writing Tips, and What Makes a Bestseller
Aw. It’s sad to watch a poor, lonely author in a bookstore or at a book festival who simultaneously desires and dreads conversations with customers. Because people! Conversations! Eeek! And then there are those authors who flag you down like street canvassers…
Love the Query: 3 Tips, 12 Stages of Despair, and 1 Playlist
Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The idea being each failure teaches one to design a better experiment–or novel. More failures means more learning…