One of the things that has happened to me in the course of becoming a published and then a veteran writer is that I no longer see my favorite writers as gods. It's kind of sad, but it's an important part of believing in myself and my own writing. The better you become as a writer, the more you see the process behind the scenes in other writing.
I ( Read more... )

I just got back from a critique session with my awesome writer’s group. They finished the last of three sections of my transgender science fiction YA set in the far future on another planet. And they were confused. What did this part of the plot have to do with that part of the plot? It seemed like I had suddenly come up with a cool idea halfway ( Read more... )

The biggest barrier to writing well is not skill, education, time, or talent. It is fear. Fear is what keeps people from practicing writing until they gain a skill. Fear is what makes people believe that they don’t know enough to write, or to start writing. Fear is what subconsciously often makes people put off writing until they have more time, ( Read more... )

I know there are tons of books out there that are designed to give you tips on how to write a good plot and how to make your characters likeable. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading them and learning from them ( Read more... )

I am having a day of doubt. You've probably had one of those days. You've probably had more than one of them. I know I have. But every time I have one, it hurts and makes me queasy as much as the ones before. And we forget so easily how many we've had, how often they come, and how necessary they are.

So today, I'm spending some time and looking back ( Read more... )

I got an email recently from a young person who wanted my advice on how to get published as soon as possible. And I shook my head a little, and then sighed, and remembered when I was that age, making it a New Years resolution every year to get published, and sure that when I was, I would finally feel like I had “made it,” that I had justified my ( Read more... )

1. You owe your publisher the courtesy of timely information. This means if you’re going to be late delivering a book, you try to give as much notice as you can. Which means giving updates to an editor about where you are in the revision process.

2. You owe your publisher your own efforts at self-promotion. This means if a publisher asks you to go ( Read more... )

It was about three years ago that I sat down with Kristyn Riley Crow​ at one of our regular lunches and told her that I was giving up writing. I'd been doing it for more than ten years professionally and it just wasn't worth it. I'd spent hours and hours unpaid, working on projects I believed in and no one else did. I'd published books that ( Read more... )

First a list of things NOT to do:

1. Do not read the jacket copy of your book.
2. Do not read blurbs of your book or reviews of your book.
3. Basically, don’t read anything, even something you have written about your book.
4. Don’t spend your precious presentation time thanking people for help in getting to the publication of your book. This is not an awards ( Read more... )

You know the old adage that you always regret the thing you haven’t done more than the things you have? Well, I think it’s true for writers. You always regret the books you didn’t write more than the ones you did that got panned or didn’t make money or disappointed you in any other way ( Read more... )