» A Guest Author

How to Set Concrete Goals for Your Writing

By Ratika Deshpande One of the most helpful things I’ve done for my writing is setting concrete goals. Writers struggle to establish a daily writing habit because, well, building habits is difficult, and we have other responsibilities that need our attention–jobs, families, health. In all that mess and uncertainty and lack of time, a concrete…

Issue Five Hundred Twenty Two Special Feature

How a Reprint and a Long Held Story Got Published

By Nancy Julien Kopp Some years ago, I had written a personal essay about how my father, who had a problem acknowledging disabled people, learned to accept his first grandchild who was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. Those two disabilities proved a big burden for our sweet baby girl but also the catalyst for…

Case Studies Issue Five Hundred Twenty One

Case Study: How “A Long Walk with Mary: A Search for the Mother of God” Was Published

By Brandi Willis Schreiber This is part of our ongoing series on how authors published their first book. You can read our other stories in this series, here, here, here, here, and here. I’d been driving solo for a few hours. Long, golden stretches of West Texas blurred into New Mexico, and as I scanned the thin…

Case Studies Issue Five Hundred Nineteen

The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts: Now Seeking Submissions

The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts is an online publisher of shortform writing like micro fiction/nonfiction, flash writing, and prose poetry. The journal is a project of Matter Press. They pay contributors $50 per published piece. At The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts they believe, “that something very small can add up to something very…

Creative Non Fiction Fiction Issue Five Hundred Seventeen Literary Journals Poetry

7 Ways Blogging Helped My Writing

By Lory Widmer Hess In my mid-thirties, shortly before my son was born, I sold two essays to national magazines and thought my writing career had finally been launched. Then, postpartum depression and relationship issues struck, and while wrestling with those challenges, I didn’t write creatively for years. In my jobs in nonprofit publicity and…

Issue Five Hundred Seventeen Uncategorized

My Path to Publication

By Jane Lo I’ve always loved to write stories. Prior to 2020, I had written a few short stories and personal essays – and when I was in high school, had even written a long, meandering tale I liked to think of as a ‘novella’ – but it wasn’t until January 2020 that I really…

Issue Five Hundred Sixteen Special Feature

Writing Authentic Historical Fiction

By Garth Pettersen Historical fiction can be defined as made-up stories involving true events or series of events that happened at an earlier time. Some suggest historical fiction should be set before mid-twentieth century, but to my thinking if a reader accepts a time setting to be recognizably different from the present, it is history….

Issue Five Hundred Fifteen Special Feature

Lessons from a 3-Year-5-Month Writing Streak

By Ratika Deshpande I started writing every day when I was 16. Because I was young, I’d developed certain ideas about how writing works by learning about other writers’ processes. I took these notions with me to my writing desk every day for over three years. And I watched as each was built upon or…

Issue Five Hundred Fourteen

8 Tips for Making Your True Story Come Alive

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford I have always loved apples, applesauce and cooking with apples. It’s all rooted in a fond memory that makes a great story, well worth the telling and sharing multiple times over. But, to just say I like to make applesauce isn’t enough. I am a storyteller, after all, and even my…

Issue Five Hundred Sixteen Special Feature

POV – Don’t Confuse the Reader

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Whose story are you telling? Yours? Or someone else’s? Are you planning to share the story from multiple perspectives? From the point of view of the protagonist as well as the antagonist? Not to mention the other characters in the story? Multiple points of view can be complicated, both for the…

Issue Five Hundred Ten Special Feature

Using TikTok to Promote Your Writing

by Ellen Levitt Authors are constantly reminded to use social media in order to promote their books, articles, essays and other writing. There are many options and various platforms available to us. Should TikTok be one of them? TikTok has a mixed reputation. On the one hand, it is wildly popular with various age groups,…

Issue Five Hundred Nine

How to Stay Motivated (So You Can Finish Your Writing Projects)

By Abdulraheem Jameel Ango I’ve started more writing projects than I’ve finished. If you’re anything of a passionate writer, then the same is probably true for you. Once you turn your hand to writing, the perceived difficulty of starting a writing project fades away almost immediately and yet a couple of thousand words later, numerous…

Issue Five Hundred Eight Special Feature

Traditional or Self Publishing – That is the Question

By Rod Martinez Traditional or Self-Pub? It’s a question we all ask. Once you have edited, and re-edited… and re-re-edited your masterpiece, the bug bites. “I want this book in the hands of readers!” The quickest method, it seems, is to self-publish. It’s easy, it’s actually free on most sites and you can have readers…

Issue Five Hundred Seven Special Feature

The First Draft: Love It or Hate It? Just Write It!

By Dawn Colclasure Some writers fear writing a first draft. The first draft is that blank page looming before them, daring the writer to compose a masterpiece. Feeling as though they must write a perfect first draft is just one of the roadblocks writers face when it comes to writing something new. It is also…

Issue Five Hundred Six Special Feature

Five Things To Do After Getting Rejected as a Writer

By Samuel Edward Imagine squeezing time out from other daily engagements and committing some of your brightest of creative ideas into a 5,000-word story, with a deadline for submission fast approaching. The late nights, the backaches from hours of sitting, the many rough drafts. And then the joys of putting the final touches to your…

Issue Five Hundred Five

Articles by A Guest Author