My Words Fly Up
Write What You Know
“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.
Final Round
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
Buying Secondhand Books
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
New and Improved
And here is it, my new and improved website! Actually, the changes are mostly visual. A new picture on the home page (I’m partial to all birds, but especially swans); and the cover of Tailor-Made, a book that was originally published back in the last century and which I will be republishing shortly. After Tailor-Made,
First, Update My Website
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.
Be Social
MY WORDS FLY UP
In which I blog about the days I write and the days I don’t write; about teaching about writing; about reading (which is never enough); and occasionally about music, because sometimes a three-minute song can tell as good a story as a novel.