“Toz, where the frog are you now?” That’s me foaming at the mouth yesterday morning. But frog—really? My daughter’s been sanitizing my language. Without swearing, I can find Waldo in his red striped hat, no matter how well he hides….
J. Ryan Stradal is the fiction editor of the online magazine The Nervous Breakdown and the acquisitions editor at Unnamed Press in Los Angeles. His debut novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, is the story of a young woman with…
Hoo-boy. After sitting alone for hours working on their opuses, writers must then come out of their dark caves and release their work into the wild, strategize about marketing and self promotion, become a brand, read widely to be a…
Character profiles are great for first drafts. I fill out a ton of those for each character. I cast my characters with favorite TV and movie stars. I create playlists for each character. These profiles create character shells, but rarely…
Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Figures from online retailer…
Congratulations to those hard-working authors who will see their novels on bookstore shelves — physical, digital, or both — in the near or distant future. Whether your book has already launched, will launch within the next year, or you’re still…