Tag: featured
Surviving the Dank and Lonely Editing Cave
As I write in this terribly uncomfortable chair, I’ve just finished over five months of straight editing. Five. Straight. Months. All writers know the woes of editing: The empty loneliness that sometimes accompanies us in our dark, dank, and dusty writing caves. The desire to slam your face into your keyboard because hey, maybe that […]
Houses As Inspiration
We talk about how our relationships have changed us but comparatively little about how a love affair with a house can alter the course of our thinking and our lives. Where we live is our second skin, for women often part of our identity, so perhaps it’s no wonder that all my novels have been […]
The Distracted Writer
It is always my intention to turn off wi-fi when I write. It has yet to happen. What if I need to look something up? After all, I write historical fiction and there is always a fact to check, a photo to look at, a map to consider. I often wonder how people wrote before […]
Women Writing the Erotic: Sexual Themes in Fiction
Love, yearning, loss, truth and deceit, freedom and constraint: these themes have long occupied a place in our literary canon. From classical literature, we’re familiar with the torment between Cathy and Heathcliff, and between Jane and Rochester. Within the subtext of these two classic stories of love, lies a narration of sex and sexual desire, […]
It’s Not Rejection; It’s Feedback.
I imagine the easygoing among us don’t remember their first time receiving constructive criticism; teflon, some people, or indifferent. Not me. In primary school the report card system was E for excellent, S for satisfactory, and U for unsatisfactory. I swam in a pool of excellence until the day I received an S in handwriting. By the […]
Q&A with Evan Gregory, Senior Literary Agent Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency
Evan Gregory began at Ethan Ellenberg in 2008. He is currently expanding his client list. He has widespread interests including: FICTION – Horror, Mystery, Thrillers, Science-fiction, Fantasy, Women’s literature. NONFICTION – Arts, Cinema, Photography, Biography, Memoir, Business, Investment, Cooking, Food, Wine, Health, Diet, History, Nature, Ecology, Parenting, Family, Politics, Current affairs, Pop culture, Entertainment, Science, […]
How To Write What Hurts
You have a story to tell; something you’ve experienced that can help other people. It’s been burning inside of you, screaming that you give it a voice. But, as I know too well, sitting in front of the computer is a completely different animal. Words freeze up as thoughts refuse to be expressed. Memories hide […]
How Ancestral Research Can Lead to Memoir
In November, 2011, ten years and one month after the death of my mother, Nannie B Chandler Nelson at age ninety-six, I found myself eager to explore my ancestral roots through her blood line. The challenge was more significant than me, I believe, than for a person who has visited with, and heard tales of […]
Get A Real Job!
Imagine asking a best-selling author for advice on your writing career and being told to get a real job first? Well, that’s essentially what happened on Twitter last week when Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, started a bit of a controversy with this tweet: ‘English Major = Want Fries With That? Pick something […]
Transitioning From Freelance to Full-Time Writer
How I Found Freelance Writing Jobs In fall 2015, I started researching how to build a freelance writing business to make money. I signed up on Upwork.com and was able to search for assignments. I also began researching start-ups in my home city, Chicago. Blogs are all the rage for companies these days. They drive […]
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