I’m still mining great information from the panel discussion by small press publishers I attended at the Wisconsin Book Festival. As the discussion got deep into how to find a publisher for your chapbook, policies varied, from accepting unsolicited manuscripts to invitation-only, but all of the publishers the advice quickly turned to a point on [...]
It all started with the decision to scrub the shower.
Despite having a water softener and using Iron Out religiously, it still gets iron stains. So I donned my Nyplex gloves and started in with the cleanser.
Then my hand, and the tile it was scrubbing, went through the wall.
The rest of the saga isn’t important (though [...]
Invariably, this question comes up at author events, and it came up Saturday at Doug W. Jacobson’s reading and talk about Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II. Doug’s presentation at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum was part of the Wisconsin Book Festival.
I spent the day in Madison, attending several presentations and readings, and [...]
DoubleX, the online magazine by and for women that spun off of Slate, today has a delightful interview with Judy Blume, an author who meant the world to me during a truly awful stretch of adolescence, roughly from age 11 to 14.
Cue the Rod Serling voice: Picture, if you will, a Midwestern girl with gappy [...]
It’s Banned Book Week! The American Library Association annually uses the last week of September to celebrate “the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment,” according to the ALA website.
Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted [...]
I’ve been feverishly working on the novel, and while that’s my inclination anyway, there’s a certain heightened state of energy and attention I only get when I’m under a deadline. I’m enjoying such a heightened state right now: the first section of this new book is due to my critique group on Monday.
Part of using [...]
Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at the online magazine Slate, announced this week that she’s going to write a novel online this month:
When we were told to take time off from our everyday beats to do some kind of ambitious, long-form journalism, my first instinct naturally was to do something legal. Then I thought I’d [...]
In the above video (released by HarperCollins and found on The Daily Beast’s Book Beast section), successful mystery writers Linda Fairstein and Jane Stanton Hitchcock discuss, among other things, whether they know the ending of their story–whodunnit–when they begin.
Guess what? One does and one doesn’t.
So it goes with writing advice. What works for one writer [...]
I’ll say it up front: I despise the term “chick lit.”
Let me also admit that I steadfastly avoid the kinds of books I think of as belonging to this category: the designer-name-dropping, upscale-housing-trendy, single-female-on-a-shopping-and/or-sex-spree-but-longing-for-mister-right books.
But I’ve seen plenty of well-written, nuanced books tagged with the term, and it seemed to me that these books were [...]
Orson Scott Card’s craft book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy begins, interestingly enough, with a discussion of genre. He specifically discusses the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy, but what he says could as easily apply to a discussion of “literary” versus “women’s” fiction or (horrors!) “chick lit”:
…common wisdom has it that more males [...]