Writer vs. Cat
When authors have pets…
Loving My Library
On Friday, I headed downtown during my lunch break to practice that most fundamental of rights: voting. There are plenty of hot-button issues on the table politically right now, and plenty of hotly contested races to fill many a smear campaign ad. While I certainly had my political leanings in tow when I drove to the early-voting site, there’s another issue – on the back of that ballot – for which I was very interested in exercising my right to…
When Your Book Doesn’t Sell
Listen up, aspiring writers. Here's something you may not know: Having an agent is no immediate guarantee that a manuscript will sell. It could find a publishing home in a matter of minutes or it could float around in submission purgatory for a year or two. A tough lesson to learn is that, should the latter be your book's fate, it isn't because you're a bad writer with a bad book and a bad agent. Well, I guess it could…
Why I Stopped Writing
a.k.a. The Summer of Doctor Who Okay, okay. Don’t panic. I was purposefully being a bit cheeky with that blog title. I haven’t stopped writing for good, but I figured if the folks at Empire News can go viral with a misleading headline about Betty White dying, I can say I stopped writing without technically meaning it! Actually, the fact is I did stop but only for a while. And the incident begs the question, when is it okay for…
The Three-Name Effect
It works for Neil Patrick Harris. For Mary Chapin Carpenter. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Edgar Allan Poe. George Washington Carver. Martin Luther King and Mary Tyler Moore. Hell, even Kathie Lee Gifford. Not to mention all three of the kids from Home Improvement (who, by the way, are all like 30-something now. Just let that sink in.) Yes, folks, there is a countless number of three-name famous people across the entire celebrity spectrum. And when I first set out on this journey…
The Plotting Pantser
The Evolution of a Writing Process I've blogged quite a bit about my writing process on the site, probably most definitively in this post. As I progress through writing my third novel, it's interesting to see how the process changes with each project. I've gone from a strict plotter to a semi-pantser (as in, flying by the seat of one's pants), realizing that the distance between those two doesn't have to be all that far. With Welcome to Straightville, I was meticulous…
Setting as Character
"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…
YA Erotica?
I've got a new FREE e-read avaialble. But it comes with a caveat. As a writer of young adult fiction, any sexual situations that have taken place in my books have been in the PG-13 range. That’s partly to maintain age appropriateness and partly because writing straight-up erotica has never been my thing. I’m not one to kiss and tell about my own sexual practices, let alone write entire scenes around those of my characters. But then I was invited…
5 Questions NOT to Ask a Writer
Note: I’ll preface this post by saying I’m being purposefully snarky. I appreciate inquiries about my writing career from friends, relatives and acquaintances, including the following ones. But I won’t pretend that I haven’t ever been annoyed at being asked one of these questions, despite the good intentions its asker may have. That being said, here are 5 questions never to ask a writer – specifically one in the traditional publishing business who has yet to actually publish a book. 1….
Coping with Rejection
The other day I tweeted this clip from The Golden Girls of Blanche Devereaux perfectly summing up two of the most frustrating aspects of a writer's life: writer's block and rejection. It's the rejection phase that I've gotten fairly used to over the past couple of years. We writers face rejection from all over the place. Those of us in the traditional publishing realm often get our first (and second, third, fourth…) taste of it during the querying process as…