The other day, I was waiting in a small parking lot to pick up a friend. A big black truck—so common here in New England—pulled in beside me. I had my car windows down to let in fresh air, but the pickup driver kept his engine running and had his talk-radio station on just a …
“Write what you know” is one of the more confounding pieces of writerly advice. It can, unfortunately, be interpreted as “write what you have experienced.” I say unfortunately because, for most of us, that would result in deadly dull fiction. I used to complain to my mother about having been raised in white-bread suburbia. …
No work of art is perfect when first conceived and first worked on. I’ve never been satisfied with a book until it’s gone through at least three sets of revisions. Eventually, though, I reach the final round, and solutions for all the remaining plot and character problems appear effortlessly. The final round can be …
For most of my life, I never went anywhere without a book. I was always a great reader, as were my brothers, and on trips, silence frequently reigned in the backseat as we all read. This habit held me in good stead in college, where as an English major I had to read thousands of …
A few decades ago, I read a publishing-industry report about how many times a paperback book was sold and resold and resold again. All those readers, yet the author only earned royalties for one sale. After that, I was careful about books that I bought secondhand—only authors who had sufficient sales and income, or books …
When I decided to reissue all my previous publications this year, I actually started with my website. When my website guru, Julie, and I first designed this site, I was getting ready to publish two books, Lost Mothers and Every New Beginning. Now, however, there will be six more books. Julie and I agreed: time to update my website.
Many years ago, I published a number of books—five romance novels and Free Fall, a coming-of-age novel. Recently, I reread my first romance, Tailor-Made. I had forgotten how much fun I had writing it; and, considering it was my first book, it’s really quite good. Reading it again got me thinking. Maybe it’s time to reprint.
My urge to create can vary from a background murmuring, like a stream, to crashing ocean waves. When the waves hit, I have no problem setting myself in front of a notebook or computer and writing. But, if too many tasks in my everyday life smother that urge to create, until it’s barely a trickle, I can easily ignore my writing.
Back in the day, when I lived in New York in the 1980s, a new singer-songwriter was getting a lot of attention—Suzanne Vega. I bought her first album as a cassette tape, and then had to buy it again because I wore out the tape. Eventually I bought the CD, which I found recently when I was reorganizing my music collection. I immediately played it, and aside from being transported back to that other place and time in my life, I was struck—again—by Vega’s wonderful imagery and lyricism.
As I mentioned earlier, back in 2016, I have resurrected a book I wrote in 2000 that both my agent and I loved. When Paige suggested I try revising it, I was skeptical, worried I would be unable to modernize the story. (Technology, which had a major influence on the plot, has changed radically in the past seventeen years.) Yet as I began revising, I realized that many of the changes, which required both rewriting and writing new, were quite simple. The two major revisions I made led to the introduction of two new characters, one for each revision. Those characters shifted a few other plot points, and it became apparent that both characters would play an important role in the last third of the book, which I already knew would need to be almost completely rewritten. The first two-thirds only required revision work, some minor, some (with these two new characters) major.