On my thirtieth birthday, it rained all day and I was in a mood to match. I spent the morning babysitting, as most thirty-year-olds are wont to do, then spent the afternoon feeling terribly sorry for myself. I had decided…
I took a course called Technical Writing in grad school. The professor assigned a short manual that he had written himself as the required reading. He spent a lot of the time talking about the precision of language required to…
1. You have 20 minutes to write before your child wakes up, or you have to go to work, or your cat finally chews through your computer’s power cord. You turn on your computer and see that you have 5…
The novel discussed in this October, 2017, post was recently selected by Golden Antelope Press for publication this October, 2019. Instead of writing what you know, have you ever written who you know? My as yet unpublished novel, You Can…
I recently returned from living as my protagonist. To match my novel of historical fiction about queer pirates, I sailed for a week on a wooden tall ship from Boston to New York City. It was my 30th birthday gift…
People used to ask, “When is your next book due?” and I would laugh, self-consciously, because I didn’t have deadlines. I wasn’t a writer who had contracts or editors waiting for me to produce anything. In those bygone days, I…