Tag: featured
Losing Room #2
From the time Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency showed up in my Google search for writing residencies, I knew we were meant to go the distance. I applied in the summer of 2009, and a few weeks later, I got an acceptance note from the director at the residency: Justen Ahren. I used to be a […]
Winning The Waiting Game
One thing I never expected when I embarked upon my writing journey was how much time I would spend waiting. Waiting for word on literary submissions; for agents’ responses to queries; for editors’ feedback on manuscripts; for magnificent covers to announce my novels to the world; for reviews to catapult said novels to the top […]
Real Writers Write in Coffee Shops
Natalie Goldberg states in her book, Writing Down the Bones, that it is essential for a writer to have a relationship with a coffee shop. The picture of the writer sitting in a coffee shop penning the next bestseller is ubiquitous. In fact, sitting here in a coffee shop, I can see at least two […]
The Unexpected Twist, and Other Delights, of Writing Mystery
Writing mystery, I find, is nearly as suspenseful as reading it, though I obviously know who the killer is way before the reader. Some mystery authors, however, have confessed to being as surprised by who comes forward as the killer as the reader eventually is! Personally, I can’t abide that level of anguish, so I plot […]
The First Page: Inspiration and Perspiration
When I decided to write a novel, I hadn’t written so much as a short story since high school. I took no English classes in college, and I’d never taken a single writing class. But I loved reading, and I’d read thousands of books in my 44 years. I’d also been a lawyer, so I […]
Rejection vs. Failure
“You do your best work after your biggest disasters.” Tim Robbins, as quoted in The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp Finding neither a publisher, nor an agent, for my memoir after three years of looking does not constitute my life’s biggest disaster, but in terms of my writing it did. There’s no creative project into which I […]
To the Stars Through Difficulties
I’ve loved fiction about women for as long as I can remember. I come by that love naturally. My mother had subscriptions to McCall’s and Redbook; my grandmother divided The Woman’s Home Companion into thirty segments to ensure there would be something to read every night during her otherwise somewhat dismal life as an early […]
On Swearing In Writing
I have a potty-mouth. It’s not a bad thing. For a long time, though, I was ashamed of what came out of my bazoo. Why couldn’t I be demure—ladylike, like the fairy-tale damsel? It’s not as if I didn’t try to make nice. We bobby-socked baby-boomers were groomed to. Still, I just couldn’t ‘do’ pink […]
Why We Write about Home
Long before I knew southern fiction was an actual genre, I loved stories set in the south. From a young age, something about the cadence of life, the storytelling, the language—maybe even the proximity to water—pulled me in and made me sad to leave. One tradition that stuck out to me in this genre (it’s […]
Get the Imp off my Shoulder
I’ve been having a hard time keeping pre-launch publicity efforts from totally derailing my creative spirit. These days I have two little imps, one on each shoulder, each spurring me in different directions. One wants me to write content pieces, blog, update social media and my mailing lists, and the other screaming at me that […]
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