Often I feel like I’m stealing time from everything else I should be doing to write. Or else, I’m living the nightmare of an “I’d rather be fishing” bumper sticker. In this metaphor fishing = writing. It’s a constant trade-off…
I assigned myself this blog because Life had taken me away from Art and I needed a way back to the page. I thought if I had a deadline I’d produce. And I have produced—many many badly written glib little…
(Note: This rant was originally inspired [or should I say, rekindled] by this Grub Street blog post by Suzahn Ebrahimian.) It was frustrating when I first got into more “serious” fiction writing, for I was a good little student. I…
I was floundering in the Murky Middle of my novel. You know that place—the one that happens after you’ve sent your hero off to find her heart’s desire, but before she actually gets it. Right, that place—the big, awful middle…
When a poet writes a novel the moon coils up into a copper-headed snake and hisses secrets. The horizon line bends like a cello string after the sun nods off into the thinning green sea to sleep. When a poet…
After I jubilantly signed with an agent I met at last year’s Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston, well-meaning friends and fellow writers began bombarding me with advice. You need more Facebook followers. You have to be more visible…