*Of my books, anyway Once, while at a writing conference, I heard author Charlene Harris say: “Never read your reviews. That is a poisonous pit.” And I agree. Over time I’ve learned that, if I read a good review of one of my books, I’m happy for a little while. But if I read a bad one, it stays with
I recently decided to move ahead with self-publishing The Ghosts of Marshley Park. And almost immediately was met by two differing responses online: people cheering me on and people who wished me well in a way that absolutely suggested the passive-aggressive tone of, “You weren’t good enough for ‘real’ publishing, eh?” To be fair, tone is super difficult to discern
Years ago, when I was feeling bad about my lack of success as a writer, I made a timeline of my writing history to remind myself of how far I’d come. I don’t know where that timeline is now, or even what software I used to make it, but I do still find looking back at my journey gives me
I realized something the other day. Honestly, it’s a wonder it has taken me this long to come to this conclusion, but the nature of our society is to encourage us to chase things… even when doing so isn’t healthy. I’ve been writing for a long time. I mean, pick a benchmark: I started writing my first stories when I
Here is what I’m discovering—or maybe it’s what keeps getting thrust into my face from all sides. I don’t and can’t function within the typical constructs of, er… Well, the business world, anyway. The best job I ever had was atypical. I worked in a little family-owned shop, and the place really was like a big family. Like something out
I came late to Twitter’s “Harsh Writing Advice” trend, but apparently someone posted that other writers are your competition, and then got slammed, and then deleted the tweet, but of course (because Internet) it’s still around in various formats. People piled on this guy for posting this, and… given that he didn’t really explain his logic (if there was any),
This question has come up a lot just recently, so I decided to write a post about it: “How do you name your characters?” I prefer to have my characters introduce themselves. Sometimes they do that right away, meaning I know their name first thing. Sometimes, though, they’re a bit shy about it, and we play a game of Rumpelstiltskin.
A couple years ago, a literary agent was very interested in one of my manuscripts. I, naturally, was excited about this. But then, quite suddenly it seemed, she grew a bit cold in our correspondences. Eventually, I was given a form rejection. I have a private Twitter list where I keep all the agents I’ve been querying. I add and
The publishing world is a complicated place. More so now than ever, really. It used to be relatively straightforward: you wrote a book, you submitted it to agents, they said yes or no, and if they said yes, they submitted the book to publishers who would also say yes or no. For some publishers, it was possible to skip the
There are 39 days left in the year, which means it’s time to begin the process of reflecting on all that has occurred. And for a year spent mostly at home, there is surprisingly a lot to review. I started the year with health issues and big plans. My focal nodular hyperplasia (FNH) in my liver had begun to act