Tag: featured
Beyond Revision—Weirding Up Your Writing
What do you do when you’ve written and rewritten a piece, and it still falls flat? Some approaches to re-vision an essay that is refusing to cooperate. I wrote six beautiful, heart-breaking pages and electronically submitted them to my advisor. It was a great story. Her reply was something along the lines of, “That last […]
Tackling the Daunting Second Novel
I began writing my second novel while I was querying my debut novel, The Hideaway. “They” tell you to do that to keep yourself from obsessing over the responses that come (or don’t come) from agents. Working on that second book gives you something else to focus on, plus it’s never a bad thing to […]
Taking Back the House By Elaine Neil Orr
The year I attended first grade, I lived with my family in a two-story house (the style is called a foursquare) in the West End neighborhood of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The house already seemed a bit run down. It had probably been a rental for some years. Among my most vivid memories is a small […]
Walking My Talk
As an author of a self-help book, I’ve done my best to share and live what I have learned about gathering calm around me during times of change. Feeling exposed, definitely not a calm feeling, has been my most prevalent emotional state as I’ve stepped into this new role of published author. Last month, a […]
Interview in Writers Digest: Curation & Community: Inside the Online Literary Magazine Women Writers, Women’s Books
We’re hugely excited about featuring in Writer’s Digest! Read the interview HERE
Writing Tiny: A Look Into Flash Fiction
Plot, characterization, structure, hook. These are buzzwords for writers everywhere, words we live and breath, ideas we sacrifice hours of our lives toward (and maybe even a few tears) just so we can craft the perfect story. We agonize over each paragraph and chapter, and we probably use hundreds of pages while doing so. When […]
ADJUSTING TO YES by Julie Maloney
The journalist sitting across from me in the café was someone who had been following me for years. Several times, she had written about the non-profit organization I founded fifteen years ago called Women Reading Aloud. She had kept up with how things had progressed from welcoming writers gathered around the dining table in my […]
A Mother and Daughter Crime Fighting Duo for the 21st Century
Literature has not been kind to mothers. From the earliest stories fed to us at bedtime, mothers die and get replaced with evil stepmothers. Coming of age stories are filled with overbearing maternal figures. It’s the mother who creates a serial killer or gives birth to psychopaths. I didn’t set out to write a mother/daughter […]
Gondoliers and Writing
Your story sounds like a movie or a book. You should write one. The gazzillionth time I heard those words when first meeting someone was when I decided to take that advice. So began a nine year passage to learning and self-discovery; almost a decade dedicated to writing a story inspired by a chance encounter […]
The Professional Writer
In his groundbreaking book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell wrote about the power of practicing 10,000 hours in order to reach a higher level of proficiency and greatness in one’s profession or hobby. When I read his theory, I remember feeling as if that was one of the fairest statements ever made. In a lottery world revolving […]
Recent Comments