You know how it goes. You sit down at your computer and stare at the blinking cursor. You type a sentence. You erase it. You get a snack and drop crumbs all over your keyboard. You wait for the muse to show up, but she seems to be on vacation. Maybe you’re stuck trying to decide how to start. Maybe… View Post
Writing Novels No One Wants I wrote my first novel at the age of 24. And now, at the terrifying age of 40, I have written eight complete manuscripts. The first few were practice novels, never to leave the depths of my computer, but the most recent two are pretty good, I think. Not perfect, but worthy of going out… View Post
I connected recently with writer Rachel Sarah, like one does these days, through a writers’ facebook group, and the more I learned about her career, the more impressed I became. She started out, at the age of twenty-one, as a journalist in the Czech Republic. She then earned her journalism degree from The New School in New York City, became… View Post
Please, please, please, before my head explodes, will everyone please stop calling The Giver a YA book? I don’t know why this offends me so much except for the fact that The Giver is SO CLEARLY a middle grade novel. The protagonist is twelve. The word count is 43,600. It is commonly assigned to middle schoolers. All kidlit genre indicators… View Post
Recently I finished revising a YA Contemporary novel I wrote a few years back. I was excited for about five minutes. Then I freaked out. I’m forty years old. What the heck do I know about “kids these days”? Plus there’s COVID to consider, which makes writing contemporary fiction all the more complicated. Should I do another revision, putting my characters… View Post