Abuse kind of fucks up your head. Anybody who’s been there will tell you that. And while we survivors can respond to the injustices done upon us in a myriad of ways, I’ve noticed a significant ratio of us seem…
As writers, we expect rejection. We are told we should embrace it, that we aren’t really writers until someone slams a door in our face. Rejection seasons us, toughens our skin. I think I may have internalized this advice a…
People used to ask, “When is your next book due?” and I would laugh, self-consciously, because I didn’t have deadlines. I wasn’t a writer who had contracts or editors waiting for me to produce anything. In those bygone days, I…
I’m about a month out from the publication of my debut novel, Cottonmouths, and let me tell you, it’s been a whirlwind. But my whirlwind is definitely different from other authors’ whirlwinds because as I’ve mentioned before, we’re all special…
It’s the stuff of nightmares. The thing that keeps established authors up at night during their lowest points of self-confidence; what gets newbies wasting their time trying to copyright their books before they even begin to write them; what causes…
I am not a Buddhist (although I have researched Buddhism in the service of one of my novels), but I’ve spent time pondering in relation to my writing a variant of the famous Buddhist kōan*: You can hear the sound…