Editing your novel manuscript can be a painful, embarrassing process. For me, one of the many humbling things I find in a stack of freshly drafted pages is how often I’ve been entirely unoriginal. During the first pass of anything,…
I’m sure you’ve all heard the advice to put your manuscript in a drawer for a few months before tackling the next revision. Getting some distance allows you to see things you otherwise can’t because you’re too close to it….
I have difficulty sitting, a condition I treat with an ever-present pillow and an unusual form of therapy — one I find instructive as a writer. I practice doing nothing. I was turned onto this ‘nothing’ therapy by Dr. David…
The end of year always puts me in the mood to clean. A new year might be an arbitrary marker of time passing, but finishing up a calendar fills me with the desire to say good-bye to some things, to…
Emily Ross’s debut novel, Half in Love with Death (Merit Press – December 18th, 2015), chronicles fifteen-year-old Caroline’s quest to find her recently missing older sister. It seems nobody can help Caroline. Her parents can’t stop blaming each other, her friends…
In her recent essay, “On Pandering,” Claire Vaye Watkins records the shock of discovering that she wrote, primarily, for old white men, members of the literati like Franzen, Roth, et al whose approval she sought and to whose tastes and…