Category: How To and Tips
Writing Through the Guilt by Alessandra Harris
At the beginning of the school year, my sixteen-year- old son and I did an exercise to foster conversation between parent and teen. The counselor would ask a question, and we would write our answer down and a guess as to the other person’s answer. After, we went over the questions and our answers, then […]
The Importance of Writing Nonsense
Not long before we were married, my husband and I found ourselves chaperoning a road trip with a group of high school students. My grandmother, now deceased, had been kind enough to send along some homemade goodies for the journey. Two rest stops into the trip, my husband lifted the lid on Grandma’s Tupperware to […]
Stop Writing, Start Listening
Ah, the joy of writing conferences. The anticipation is almost worth the registration fee. For weeks prior, I dream of leaving my basement office to the spiders, traveling to a shiny new city, and sleeping sideways in a hotel’s king-size bed. Recently, I registered for a conference with about a hundred other writers. All women. […]
The Professor of Mean
I went to my first writers conference a very long time ago. It was held over the summer on the University of California Berkeley campus; I believe it was sponsored by the Berkeley English department, but as they say in the movie Airplane, “that’s not important now.” I won’t name the man who was in […]
The Best Books in Life Aren’t Always Free
If you’re like me (and pretty much every other author on the planet), your most fervent desire is to find readers who’ll love your writing and be ready, willing and able to pay for the opportunity to read all those beautiful words you’ve toiled over. But, to paraphrase our dear writer pal, Will Shakespeare, “therein […]
What’s Your Writerly Unique Selling Point?
When I decided to fly to California and train as a bounty hunter it wasn’t part of a marketing strategy but as research for my debut novel – Deep Down Dead. You see, back then I was about 40,000 words into my first draft of a thriller featuring a single mom bounty hunter, and I […]
Unmasking Lee Kofman
Once upon a time, I began my writing life the way all writers did in my dinosaur days (the 80s) – as a fiction writer. Or that was what I thought I was. ‘What you’ve written is a diary,’ the publisher of my first book, a novel, informed me, but published it anyway. (It sold […]
Stop Looking to Others to Create a Life of Joy
Originally published on Psych Central I believe there is not enough dialogue out there about soul-sickness, especially among wealthy communities. We are taught to believe from a young age that once we have the perfect partner, house, car, children, and careers, we will be happy. And often times this is not the case; the happiness […]
My Journey To Publication: Charlotte Duckworth
I was 6 or 7 when I wrote my first ‘book’. In hindsight it was a shameless Spot the Dog rip-off, created especially for my baby sister. I don’t have any conscious idea of when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I just always loved books, reading and making up stories. Throughout my […]
Where to Hide the Body: Setting in Murder Mysteries
At the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center—also known as the Body Farm—you’ll find corpses in various conditions and stages of decay. There might be one locked in the trunk of a car or another entangled in the roots of a tree. The goal, as you might guess, is not to scare neighbors on the […]
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