January 18, 2024
By Ruth Wilson Writers write for a variety of reasons – as a creative endeavor, to clarify or share an idea, as a source of income, to respond to a muse, to play with words, etc. I sometimes write for solace. Journals I’ve kept for over 30 years include entries about sadness, anxiety, disappointments, and…
January 11, 2024
By Deb Stark My first publication credit was a poem in my high school yearbook. Only eight lines, it was a bittersweet tale about my teddy bear and the angst of aging. The poem was placed on the inside corner of a left-hand page and may have been selected more because of its size than…
January 4, 2024
By Michelle Shreeve In 1993, I was nine years old and my mother died. There were hardly any books pertaining to the death of a mother to serve as a reference guide for me as a child to try and navigate my difficult loss. I had to try and navigate the death of my mother…
December 28, 2023
By Audrey Wilson Writing a novel in itself is a huge accomplishment. That feeling you get when you write those two precious words, “The End” is truly priceless. You think nothing can beat it. Then months, or more likely years, down the road, your book is published. You’re holding that first published copy in your…
By Ley Taylor Johnson Now that you’ve reached the middle of your story, it’s time to kick up the tension with a good old-fashioned plot twist. The midpoint is a great place to up the stakes of your story, giving your protagonist new paths to explore and new challenges to overcome, all while building up…
By Lory Widmer Hess Why write a book that can’t be published? My own first book, a memoir that I wrote in the aftermath of my father’s death, was one of these. I’d never completed a full-length manuscript, only fragments and false starts, until then. But somehow, during this time of loss and grieving, I…
December 21, 2023
This new series of articles is different from anything we’ve ever published before. Most of what we have previously published focused on the perspective of submitting writers and published authors with the occasional article from an editor’s perspective sprinkled in. This series of articles, which are formatted interview style, will focus on the perspective of…
By Craig Westmore You only get one chance to make a first impression and that applies to fiction as well. Writers need to choose carefully where their fiction first appears. Whether you are seeking feedback or posting for family and friends, uploading your story to the internet can cause difficulty when trying to get it…
December 14, 2023
By Ellie Matama Writing a book is an accomplishment because it takes a lot out of you. By the time you finish, you will have invested a lot of effort and time. But completing your book is only the beginning of the struggle because books don’t sell themselves. Below are some basics of self-promotion. 1. …
December 7, 2023
By Ratika Deshpande In my psychology classes in school, I learned that you overcome your fears not by avoiding them but by facing them. So, as a young, ambitious writer, I started doing the things I was afraid of doing, such as submitting my work to a magazine I really admired. I don’t know if…
November 30, 2023
By Aliya Bree Hall We’re all busy. From balancing our jobs, families and social calendars, it can be hard to justify using our hard-earned free time to write when there’s hundreds of other things we could spend that energy on. As you can imagine, the problem with that approach is that if we’re not actively…
By Ley Taylor Clark So you’ve finally plotted out — and maybe even drafted! — all the major beats of your story. You know what’s meant to happen and when, and your novel is starting to take impressive shape. You’re feeling good, but after you do another read through or pass it off to a…
November 23, 2023
By Jess Chua I’ve always wanted to publish a book. Some of my happiest childhood moments were with books that gave me so much joy, comfort, and inspiration. Self-aggrandizing as it sounds, I always thought it’d be glorious to be able to hold a book with my name on it as The Writer. I self-published…
By Ruth Wilson It all started with a phone call. My friend, Jeannie Dennler, called to say that she needed help finishing a book that she had started ten years earlier. “If there’s one thing I need to do before I die, it’s to finish this book. It’s been hounding me for way too long….
November 16, 2023
By Kaki Olsen Aristotle is credited with the famous quote, “No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness” and it is true that great art has often emerged from troubled minds, but it is inaccurate to think that authors can’t have one without the other. I absolutely encourage putting your soul into…