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,…
GoodReads has a whole section on quotes about writing by household names like Stephen King and Annie Dillard and Mark Twain. Hemingway and Faulkner and Salinger jump in, too. Some quotes are wise, like Sylvia Plath’s assertion that “the worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt” and some are blunt like Chuck Wendig’s “try very hard not…
The other day I got a note from a writer friend saying how much they appreciated how I supported my fellow authors. In fact, I host a podcast that’s centered around that very idea. Hear Us Roar, a program sponsored by the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association, gives a showcase to its members when they publish…