The Writing Craft

In the U.S., today is Independence Day. I took the day off from work not because I wanted to celebrate the country (I’m actually quite alarmed at what is happening here) but because it is always a day where I reflect on my own Independence Day, which happened in a November more than twenty years…

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.

An acquaintance refers to her husband on social media as “MC” and she’ll recount how “MC and I went to the movies.” I can’t help but read that as “Main Character” and I keep wanting to take her aside and say, “Don’t be a sidekick in your own life! You be the MC!” Fortunately I…

“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…

Let me tell you a story about good ideas. When I first started teaching developmental editing, I taught a beginning class for a year or two and it became very popular. The sponsoring organization asked me to teach an intermediate class. So I did that. Finally that asked if I could teach another class, again…

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…

Me, on LinkedIn: Geez, you people are wound so tight. It’s just hustle hustle hustle, be A-MAH-ZING 24/7, be so good no one can ignore you . . . y’all make me need a nap. I mean, even mediocre people deserve to make a living. Gen Y person: I was a member of the Mediocre…

When I was writing The Wanderer, in several scenes I showed Lucinda making offerings to the gods in the morning. At one point she feels the breath of Leoma on her face. Leoma is the Old English word for ray of light, and I figured it was an apt name for the god of the…

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…

To live your life in your own way is the ultimate success – and an ongoing struggle. I explore that struggle in my work and have tried to embody it in my life. The Wanderer, the first in a series of novels about a pagan medieval world, introduces Lucinda who must learn to embrace who…

When I was a child, I had an insatiable appetite for fairy tales. Rumpelstiltskin, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Elves and the Shoemaker, Three Billy Goats Gruff. I mean, their fantastical aspects aside, fairy tales are a lot like life: an unprepared person enters a chaotic, upside-down world, and tries to survive. Resourcefulness is necessary,…

I started this morning trying to remember the phrase for “quotation marks.” I came up with “word hole.” Which, in fact, is a perfect description of how I feel about my current work-in-progress, an apparently neverending story that just isn’t quite there yet. All the words go in and nothing comes out. Well, not yet….