Happy summer! I hope you’re writing under a deck umbrella or blue sky or even better, a leafy tree. I’m doing some leafy writing, but I’m also critiquing my college students’ short fiction, and this endeavor has prompted me to discuss “filtering.” “See if you can reduce some of your filtering,” I comment over and…
All week, I’ve balked at writing my monthly blog post, likely because my day job drains my creative reserves. Luckily, I realized my best option was to steer into the skid and write on this very topic! I doubt many of us often grapple with the basic “what to write about at all” problem. But…
I recently asked a writer friend why he wasn’t in any critique groups, and his answer surprised me. He told me he’s always been a lone wolf when it came to his writing and that he doesn’t know how to share it without the fear of a group response “killing” the momentum. (Or, I suspect,…
Vella: The Longer and Shorter of It A few months ago, I blogged about my experiences on Amazon’s new(ish) serial platform and interviewed Vella author N. Y. Seely. You can find that article here if you want some background on the platform overall. Vella has been up and running, albeit with some glitches, for about…
“If you write a doorway, pretty soon, someone you know is going to walk through it into your story.”