On a crumbling, narrow road, thirty-two houses sit on either side of a gravel-ditched apron. My home is one of the few remaining cottages built in 1947 for wealthy folks to escape the city to the north suburbs. A patchwork of gray-blue clouds pulls like taffy across the eastern sky. The earth, browned and parched, carries unseasonably warm breezes for [...]
When I considered preparing for a book launch talk to be customary, as I had been talking about my debut novel, The Wisdom of the Willow, for some time now, it wasn’t. I had been preparing answers for questions when I realized I had been playing it safe with my writing. Over the past twenty years, I have [...]
Lately, I’ve been into writing styles as I plow through my summer reading list. I read closely for the tone, word choice, grammar, and language, the author manipulates to tell a story. I can’t help but to scrutinize what I read, from personal essays, and women’s fiction, to even nonfiction books about trees. My traveling eyes home in on a [...]
I recently saw a question posted on a social media author group page, of which I am a member, asking if any writer has earned out the amount she has put into the (hybrid) publication of her book. I read the fifty plus affirmed comments and their details. Sure, every author hopes to cash in on an investment that has [...]
Before my memoir was published, I did a lot of searching. Not to be confused with a figurative searching of the soul, for connections, for my place in life, but a literal internet search. My due diligence was to see if there were books like mine with similar titles, stories, or themes. I would publish my work in a competitive [...]
I sat down today with an intention to write a logline for my new book, The Wisdom of the Willow, currently temporarily parked in a copy edit. Anxiety bled through thoughts and limbs, and I stalled at jumping into it. What do I say? How do I narrow my book’s synopsis to just a couple of sentences? Einstein’s words struck. [...]
I’ve all but forgotten about my anniversary. This memory-maker was neither of a person nor of a place, but with a thing. When “three years ago on this day” popped up on social media, a promotional ad I had created for it, I was prompted to remember the soon-to-be anniversary. This time, it wasn’t about the big memory itself, the [...]
Are you a writer who is working on a memoir and sadly believes it’s not one because you feel it doesn’t meet the definition? “Memoir is supposed to be about one specific incident during one part of my life, and I’ve got a few of them over a couple of decades,” you say. Though you may not be able to [...]
Prior to my memoir going to press, my hybrid publisher forwarded me “first pages.” As a first-time author, I was unaware of such a thing, a PDF file of how my finished book would look. First pages was essentially a last call, an opportunity to use a phone-a-friend lifeline to correct errors missed in copyediting or proofreading, and to check [...]
Though it may sound counterintuitive, writers have been distracted during this pandemic. But how can we be now that we're no longer engaged in a multi-tasked life previously understood as “normal?” Self-isolation should give us nothing but time to write but we can't seem to get the job done. The absence of what filled my time, a void, became the [...]