One of the strategies I employed while revising You Are Here was to read the entire book aloud to myself. (I didn't do this for The Love Thing, and I regret it.) If anything sounded unnatural to my ears, I rewrote it -- or, more often, I took the awkward-sounding...
While I wait to hear from the publisher about my own book, I now have time to give a shout-out to my friend and fellow indie author Eileen Granfors, whose novel, Sydney's Story, has been published in paperback this past week. Over twenty years in the making, Sydney's...
Last Friday I went to my neighbor Clive Matson’s house for his monthly Poetry Saloon. (I’ve written about Clive before; he's a poet and creative writing teacher whose website is here.) In past months I’d gone with samples from “You Are Here” to try out on Clive and...
In the end, there wasn't much suspense: the 100th day of my 100-day novel writing challenge came and went on April 25, even though I managed to finish the project on April 15 -- on day 90. I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. Best of all,...
It's a holy mess and I don't remember half of what I've written. But it's a 102,000 words long, it has characters I love, and most of all, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I am very happy to announce I just finished my novel draft. Of the 90 days of this...
I've now completed ten weeks, or 70 days, on my journey to write a novel draft. I had given myself 100 days to write it, but since I've managed to write without missing a day since I started the journey on Jan. 17, I should be on track to finish the job by the end of...
Before I met my partner I was never good at writing lists. When I lived alone I'd try to remember what I needed to buy at the supermarket, and if I forgot something, I'd just run to the supermarket and get it. I found myself eating the same things, week after week,...
"I don't know if I ever mentioned this," Gail Collins cheekily wrote in her New York Times op-ed column yesterday, "but Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter on the roof of the car." I've been reading Gail Collins for years now , and every time...
For the past few weeks my writing day has started not with actually writing, but with my usual rounds on the Internet: checking my Facebook page (no new messages), checking out my Twitter feed (no new followers), checking out my Goodreads page (no new adds to my...
A couple of weekends ago I attended the 2012 San Francisco Writer's Conference, where among a crowd of talented writers I had the pleasure of meeting author, blogger, and Top 500 Amazon reviewer Eileen Granfors. An enthusiastic writer and reader with energy to spare,...
