December 12, 2024
By Rebecca O’Bern Based on my time in Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program and subsequently running the manuscript review service of Mud Season Review, what I learned is that “the key to the universal is through the specific.” You can’t write poems that connect with readers unless there’s clearly a person behind the scenes,…
December 5, 2024
Lory Widmer Hess I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Reading was my passion from a very early age, and authors seemed like gods to me, as they connected with the creative impulse and gave it form. I could think of no greater vocation than to do what they did, producing more of the kind…
November 27, 2024
By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Loneliness is something that can affect anyone, anywhere. You could be in a crowded room and still feel the overwhelming weight of loneliness. There are some jobs that make loneliness a handicap and, yes, writing is one of those jobs. It’s a very lonely occupation. In fact, writing as an occupation…
November 21, 2024
By Jessi Waugh We sat together at a bistro table in a one-hundred-year-old building, during the monthly writer meet-up. It was intermission time – an opportunity to order wine, socialize, or run away before the prompt writing and critiques began. Sensing her imminent escape, I struck up a conversation with the woman across from me….
November 14, 2024
By Mary Lou Dickinson After I retired from my job at the Assaulted Women’s Helpline, I was determined to have a book published. Following almost a lifetime of writing and raising two children as a single parent as well as working at various other jobs, there were a few of my short stories in literary…
November 7, 2024
By Patricia Westerhof Before I sent out my first book-length manuscript for publication, I’d spent a total of two days learning about the publishing industry. Pretty much everything I knew came from a weekend workshop: a beginner’s guide to getting published, taught by the former president/publisher at Penguin Canada. I followed the steps she suggested,…
October 31, 2024
Ratika Deshpande I previously wrote here about the benefits of maintaining a writing log and setting concrete goals, such as finishing first drafts or writing 500 words every day. Word counts have always been an integral part of my writing process; reaching the daily goal gave me something to work towards. However, for the past…
October 24, 2024
By Kristen Holt-Browning Ten years ago, I took a writing class in my small town in upstate New York with the novelist Julie Chibbaro. Although I had written poems and stories as a kid and a young person, I had pretty much stopped writing in my thirties. My husband was working full-time and commuting, I…
October 17, 2024
By Gabrielle Brinsmead H. F. Brinsmead, the environmentalist, author and my grandmother, gave me the ambition to write. She and my grandfather (whose successful weed-spraying business may have prompted her environmentalism: they argued about everything), lived in a two-storey colonial homestead on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her writing room was a tiny cubby-hole on the ground…
October 3, 2024
By Ratika Deshpande Recently, I was looking up authors who had contributed short stories to an anthology of South Asian SFF. As a fan of the genre and an Indian, it’s always exciting to find stories written by my people. So I Googled their names, hoping to read more of their stuff. Unfortunately, many of…
September 26, 2024
By Lynne Curry It wasn’t until a development editor said, “You’ve written a reader-facing novel” that I got it. The secret sauce I’d missed for years that would make my blurbs, pitches, stories, and author newsletters sing. If you’ve read craft articles on blurb and pitch writing, you’ve built the foundation you need. Add this…
September 19, 2024
By Sam Muller My second, and still-in-the-works novel, People of Dust, revolves round a mysterious disappearance of booksellers. To make the plot work, I needed a city with a flourishing book industry and, naturally, a large reading public. My genre was fantasy. Wouldn’t a technologically advanced and socio-politically sophisticated city seem too modern or science-fictionist…
September 12, 2024
By Kathryn Haueisen I’ve yet to meet the author who claims getting to market their books is the reason they write. Like most authors I love playing with words and editing them. The publication process is tedious, but predictable and manageable. But, oh my, how I dread the marketing required to sell books. I was…
August 29, 2024
By Jess Simms It’s not easy to get your work published. I know this from both sides of the table as a fiction writer as well as Managing Editor of the literary journal After Happy Hour. The journal’s acceptance rate is around 3%, meaning we say “no” about 32 times for every time we say…
August 22, 2024
by Tanya Shaffer Struggle with focus? You’re not alone. Here are 11 tips for keeping your attention where you want it to be—on your writing. As a writing workshop leader, I hear a lot about the struggle writers have in getting themselves to the table and staying there. Wrenching yourself away from bills, dishes, and…