Category: Craft Discussion

Friday Feast: Why Rejection Feels Personal, Shitty Job = Better Writer, Things You Should Worry about While Writing a Novel, Writing Historical Novels Set in Eras You Know Nothing About, and Irish Writers on How Their Irish Heritage Influenced Them

Let’s kick off the weekend by reading a little bit about the sting of writerly rejection. Then, we’ll slide into how your shitty day job is at least making you a better writer (yay). We’ll get anxious with another writer and…

Starting Anew

As I’ve been in the throes of revising my novel (again) and will soon be querying agents (again), hoping to launch my first book out into the world, visions of my next novel have been creeping into my consciousness. So,…

Crushed by the Crucible

So I did that thing, the very depressing one, where I pulled an old manuscript out of the files with the intention of fixing it. I was confident I knew the problem: it had to be the stakes. The reader…

An Interview with Michelle Hoover, Author of Bottomland

Building on her critically acclaimed debut novel The Quickening, Michelle Hoover’s gripping, brilliantly crafted new release, Bottomland, follows the Hess family’s struggle to stay together on the Iowa plains following the mysterious disappearance of two family members during the years…

Friday Feast: Speaking Out About the State of Diversity in Publishing, Working Class Literature, 5 Myths About Having an Agent, Character Agency, and Creative Writing Prompts When You Only Have 10 Minutes

I’ve taken to watching disaster movies on Saturday nights because there’s something satisfying about watching Mother Nature wipe out humanity when we’ve been so bad. This is a result of watching too many political debates and town halls and being…