Imagine a dark and blustery night, a room cast with shadows. A writer polishes her working manuscript. The publisher has asked to see what she has so far. (Plot Twist). She adds fancy words, changes the formatting, calls on the universe for extra powerful positive thinking. The wind blows like a demon out her office…
I got the completely wrong college degrees. I’ve never been bothered by this. At least I have some college degrees. And their wrongness is an accurate reflection of my nature (blooming ev-en-tu-al-ly). I didn’t know and/or embrace what I wanted out of life early on. Who cares, because I got what I wanted in the…
During her keynote at the Hawaii Writer’s Conference, Kristin Hannah said that before she could commit to the life of a writer she had to decide that it would be okay to fail. Like so many first-time novelists, Hannah wrote a manuscript and sent it off to agents, certain that it would be on the…
I read a discussion online recently about how before signing a client, an agent will read his or her author blog. Naturally. For a writer, one major reason to blog is to create a body of work online for anyone to peruse, especially, should you be so lucky, a publishing professional. The point of the…
The day before I left for Hawaii, I sat with a cup of coffee in front of my computer at 6:30 a.m. trying to come-to after a sleepless night. Suddenly Chicken Noodle burst in, arms aloft, and declared with delight, “Everything’s better, Mom!” About what happened next Noodle later recalled, “Mommy went (palms to face,…
“You hear what you need to hear, when you need it,” said Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author, at the Hawaii Writer’s Conference last weekend. So much wisdom and advice was delivered at the conference. It was fabulous—better than I’d hoped. I absorbed as much information as I could, but the message that kept…
Nine years ago I got married, turned 30, quit my job and decided to take my writing seriously. I wanted to write professionally but had no idea how to do it. So I flew to Maui with my mother for the Maui Writer’s Conference. For four days I absorbed everything I could about magazine writing.…
During the long weekend writing retreat of week-before-last, I dove into my work-in-progress essay collection (see Plot Twist). The challenges and joys of writing memoir reliably reared their little heads, leaving me somewhat dumbstruck for the first 24 hours. Some things you have to learn over and over. Essay is my very favorite genre, and…
For part of June and the entirety of July, Chicken Little’s bedroom and my office were one in the same. This caused much confusion. I would tell Little it was time for bed and she would amble towards her “old” bedroom, only to find it gutted. She would look around with consternation and begin to…
As those of you following along know, I began writing a novel a couple of months ago. It’s my first attempt at fiction. The process started off with a gleeful bang (see A Puzzled Thanks), a phenomenon all the more personally delightful because of the fact that I was suffering through what seemed to be…