Belonging has always been hard for me. I’m not a team player. In high school, when phys-ed was a team sport like softball, I asked to run the track instead. Yes, I was happier running laps alone for 50 minutes than playing with a group. My best sport was, unsurprisingly, track and field. Sprints. I…
Category: Uncategorized
I could hardly breathe, listening to Yunike’s story.
Our kids were playing marbles in the dirt road outside of her Borneo home. The electricity had been off in my friend’s neighborhood for hours. The stifling air added to her story, the heaviness of the moment turning into sweat running down my face. Yunike Hermanus, my Indonesian friend, was telling a part in her…
Finding the Courage to Walk Away
“Sometimes, the thing you most wish for is not to be touched.” The quote above comes from the musical Into the Woods and offers a caution that doesn’t apply only to fairy tales . . . it’s important advice for publishing too. It took me ten years, and five full-length manuscripts, to find an agent (and get…
WANT vs NEED
Last month we took a step back from Boy meets Girl to focus on some preliminary work. Although you can certainly throw your Hero and Heroine together on the first page, it may be better to show them apart first. Then, when Boy Meets Girl, you’ll have the opportunity for SOMETHING to catch your characters…
Marketing Physics
Back in the dark ages when I took physics, I learned about the six simple machines. When dealing with marketing, I find the lever makes a good analogy. It increases the force applied by a given amount of effort. Rephrased: You don’t have to work as hard to get the same result. Call me lazy,…