This whole novel writing without novel selling thing has been a blast, but… For those of you who may be new to my little corner of the Internet, let me catch you up before telling you how I plan to spend my summer rewriting pretty much everything I've ever written. 2008: I started writing my first novel. 2011: I finally finished what I thought was a decent draft of that novel and began querying literary agencies (far too soon, I…
When authors have pets…
"Writing is like seeing a picture of a place you've never visited before and wondering what it would be like to go there." – David James In a Huff Post Books column titled 7 Novels Starring American Small Towns, novelist Alan Michael Parker, in discussing setting as a character, suggests that the smaller the American town, the more likely it will function as a character…or at least agrees that it is a theory. And, along those lines, I recently attended a…
Earlier this year, I posed a question to my fellow scribes, asking them what is their day job – because [spoiler alert!] a lot of us aren’t full-time authors. The comment feed on that post became populated with some interesting insights from those of us walking that tightrope of writing and day jobs and families and lives. And it’s that tightrope walk that’s kept me from posting to this blog in over a month. (Nobody tell Agent Steve, please.) It…