Hello! Nice to see you again. As summer comes to a close, I hope you are feeling rested, refreshed, and ready to get back to writing no seriously your book misses you. Writing breaks are necessary. They’re important. They reacquaint you with such pleasures as nature, friends, family, and rosé. But it can be tricky […]
The Writing Life
Should authors have more freedom to respond to bad reviews?
When hotels receive good or bad reviews on sites like TripAdvisor, you’ll often see someone from the hotel respond. They may apologize for the experience or clarifying their version of events if the customer didn’t provide the whole story. And when there’s a good review, they’ll thank the reviewer. Meanwhile, in booklandia, the merest whiff […]
The scary part
I recently finished writing a new novel, and I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty scared! I don’t feel like people talk about this part of the process very much. Whenever you hear writers talking about struggles and failures, they’re often discussed when it’s all over, after that person has already gone on to find […]
Prioritize yourself
One of the hardest parts of being a writer is learning to be the right amount of selfish. Writing a book is an endeavor that takes hundreds of hours. In order to ever get it done, you have to carve out time even as you’re juggling a job, family, friends, and the temptation to binge […]
How do you convince yourself to write when you don’t feel like it?
We’re approaching a holiday week here in the U.S., which is going to throw a wrench into many a writing schedule. Summertime can be a tricky time to be a writer, when BBQs and outdoor activities beckon. So let me ask you this: How do you convince yourself to write when you really don’t feel […]
The fear of never finishing
The novel I’m working on right now has nearly been the end of me. I wrote four novels (three were published, one’s in the drawer) and one nonfiction book over a four year period. And yet it’s taken me nearly that long just to get to the halfway point of my current novel. I should […]