» A Guest Author

9 Reasons Why I Love Having My Newsletter on Substack

By Isha Jain Fed up with the long waiting periods and numerous rejections, I started publishing stories that couldn’t find a home elsewhere on Substack. What started as a way of publishing my work has now become a full-time focus for me due to the various advantages Substack provides to the creators. Here are some…

Issue Six Hundred Five

Writing Fiction: When to Consider Summary

By Sherry Shahan As a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants writer, my early drafts spill over with excess words. I’m fascinated by my characters and long to be part of their daily lives. Pages fill as soon as my protagonist rolls from bed each morning. And then there’s breakfast . . . The show-don’t-tell edict was etched into my…

Issue Six Hundred Four

National Parks and Creative Nonfiction: How Unexpected Writing Opportunities Can Boost Your Literary Career

By Felix Bill If you’d told me a year ago that my first three publications and my first writing grant would be for creative nonfiction, I’d have been baffled. When I started writing, my stories were dyed-in-the-wool speculative. Amid myth retellings and narratives that go bump in the night, I never expected to write anything…

Issue Six Hundred Three

The 4 Best Techniques for Revising Poetry

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,…

Issue Six Hundred Two

An Unexpected Journey: My Path to Publishing When Fragments Make a Whole

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…

Issue Six Hundred One

Overcoming the Loneliness of Being a Writer

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…

Issue Six Hundred Special Feature

“Are You a Good Writer?”

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….

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Nine Special Feature

One Day It Happens: How One Author Got Published Just Before Turning 70

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…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Eight

What I Wish I Knew Before I Signed My First Book Deal

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,…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Seven Special Feature

Why I Stopped Tracking My Daily Word Count

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…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Six Special Feature Special Issue

Case Study: How Ordinary Devotion Got Published

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…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Five

The Real Benefit of Persistence

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…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety Four

How and Why Authors Should Write for Other Websites and Their Own

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…

Issue Five Hundred NInety Two

The Secret Sauce for Pitches and Blurbs

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…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety One

How This Simple Strategy Changed My Writing Process Forever

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…

Issue Five Hundred Ninety

Articles by A Guest Author