Career advice
Today as I struggle to get The Dreamer prepped for publication, I wonder, as I sometimes do, if it was particularly wise to structure my entire life and career around something I decided to do when I was five years old.
Today as I struggle to get The Dreamer prepped for publication, I wonder, as I sometimes do, if it was particularly wise to structure my entire life and career around something I decided to do when I was five years old.
When I was a child my parents wouldn’t let me read science fiction or fantasy. I had to read a friend’s copy of A Wrinkle in Time during lunch and recess. When I was older I walked to the library to read books there. When I was twelve my parents decided it was okay for…
One of the things I like about traveling is that I always end up with a bunch of story ideas while I’m doing it. I need the butt-in-chair time of staying home to actually do anything with these story ideas but I almost never have them if all I do is stay at home. Which…
Every Tuesday, we go to the farmers market and I give Jessica four dollars to buy a chocolate-pecan cookie from the French baker (literally a baker who is French). And every Tuesday there just happens to be a second cookie that is broken or otherwise not quite good enough to sell to customers that makes…
“Follow up with Miranda,” the note on my schedule says. Miranda is the main character in a novel I’m writing and I’m staring at this note, trying to figure out why I’m following up with her. Did I mean “Revise Chapter 9” or something? So I open the mansucript, and I start exploring what kind…
If you want to write a non-fiction book, you need a book proposal to convince agents to represent your book and to convince editors to publish it. As a writer, I’ve found that the process of writing the proposal helps me wrestle with the prospect of spending the next year with this project. Do I love…