Caveat Scriptor: When Creators Become the Customers
The current DOJ antitrust trial about the Penguin Random House acquisition of Simon and Schuster has got the publishing and…
Writing life
Handling Rejection (and What Rejection Letters Mean—and Don’t Mean)
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. In parts one and two of this…
How to Write a Query Letter (part 2)
What makes for a good query letter that will catch an agent’s attention? Here’s a step-by-step guide.
Failure IS an Option
This is not the way that phrase is usually deployed, of course—instead we get the über-American, ultra-type-A, seriously pressure-inducing, “Failure…
Giving Your All for the Few
I want to talk about pizza for a moment, but bear with me. I promise this is going to tie…
How to Read Like an Editor
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. “If you want to be a writer,…
Writing Safe or Risking Your Readers
Let’s get the cliche out of the way: we’re living in polarized times. There seems to be a heightened sensitivity…
Are You Paying Attention to Your Progress?
The above banner picture is one I took from the summit of a mountain peak in Colorado last week, a…
The Best Character Tool You May Not Be Using
Many authors I know tend to love character-building exercises, digging deep into research to create characters with fully fleshed backstories,…
How Can Writing Matter in the Face of Suffering?
I had another post queued up for today, and then Uvalde happened. It’s hard to write about anything other than…