Category: How To and Tips
Difficult Desire
I’ve taught English for more years than I’ve written books, but if I drew a Venn diagram of my two professions’ aims, in the overlapped area, first off, I’d jot, “Pique readers’ interest.” I love helping students find the “perfect” books. Whenever my matchmaking pays off and a tough nut of a teenager—a self-professed hater […]
Fourteen Book Covers for Four Books: A Cautionary Tale about Nudity, Flailing, and Copyright
Years ago, I worked as an acquisitions editor and marketing manager in professional and educational publishing. I approved covers, and I tried to wheedle better covers out of busy and/or stubborn design departments, and I defended covers to a lot of disappointed authors. Most I considered unreasonably disappointed, though at least one was absolutely right […]
Independently Minded: One Woman’s Journey from Traditional to Self-Publishing by Anna Campbell
I spent most of my life wanting to be a published writer. By the time it happened, in my 40s, I was convinced I’d never achieve my ambitions. I sold Claiming the Courtesan to Avon HarperCollins New York at auction in April 2006 as part of a 3-book deal. Cue “dreams come true” music. Suddenly, […]
Sharing Our Stories—Shining a Light
Hendrika de Vries: When A Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew… From the time that I was a little girl curled up on my father’s lap, enchanted by his bedtime stories of fairy-tale heroes and heroines, and mythic far-away places where magical gods and goddesses could morph into animal shapes at […]
Making the Past Present: From Journalism To Historical Fiction
During the summer of 1968 I had the opportunity to work as a reporter for the daily newspaper in Red Wing, Minnesota. Writing up obituaries and descriptions of weddings while seated at my manual typewriter was okay for a week or two but soon I became hungry to get out on assignment to do interviews […]
Under Grandma’s Table
UNDER GRANDMA’S TABLE It was summertime 1926—a hot steamy night in western Kansas. Peering out from under the table, she looked around her grandmother’s kitchen. Seeing only the bottom half of things—the pie cupboard with the tiny bird-designs tapped into the tin front, the squat legs of the cast-iron stove, the open back door sending […]
Exactly Like Other Girls
By Felicia Grossman One of the fiction tropes that annoys me the most is the “not-like-other-girls” female lead. She appears across genres and often eschews anything coded “feminine” like clothes and make-up and dating. She’s not popular, but she prevails. Main characters like that and their real-life counterparts are wonderful and fun, but what makes […]
Camping: A Writer’s Strategy for Staying Observant
I am just back from a weekend camping trip to the Oregon dunes with my partner Paul, also a writer. We didn’t plan to write on this trip; we simply wanted some time away in nature, sleeping in a tent. This was car camping, driving with a packed car to a Forest Service site not […]
Second Book Syndrome
I feel as if I’ve always known the phrase ‘that difficult second album’ forever: it lives in my vernacular. Mostly due to the fact that I’m married to a man who has spent his career in the music industry and knows all about troubled artists trying to create a second body of work. Not sure […]
Pantry Skills- What Baking Has In Common With Writing
Years ago, in my heady youth, I reconnected with a guy I’d worked with on the student newspaper. We went away for a weekend. In those pre-airbnb days, it must have been a rented house, or maybe a borrowed one, but in any case, it had minimal facilities. When we arrived, after dark, miles from […]
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