I’d always scoffed at folks who diligently signed up every November to pound out a new novel. I mean, I was a writer. It wasn’t a hard job, not like piloting a plane or finding a cure for cancer. All I had to do was put my butt in the chair, turn on my laptop,…
The two most powerful words in the writer’s toolbox have got to be “What If…?” What if the world we live in is simply a computer simulation- (The Matrix) What if people can travel through time but can’t control it- (The Time Traveler’s Wife) What if robots developed into sentient beings- (Ex-Machina) What if Romeo…
There are so many things about your writing career you can’t control, but there’s one big one that you can—your author photo. As soon as you declare yourself a writer, you’ll get asked for it. You’ll upload it to your author website. You’ll splash it across your social media platforms. It’ll be printed on your…
A year ago I signed with a small press to publish my debut. I loved the acquiring editor and her “take” on my book. I felt comfortable with the owner, liked the fact that they’d do an actual print run (not just POD and E-book), that the press was run by women, and that I was…
I wrote my first short story in a day. Not that I planned it that way. I’d always wanted to try my hand at short fiction so I signed up for a week-long class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, only to discover this wasn’t a series of lectures where I’d learn the fundamentals. No,…