When I was seven years old, I received incontrovertible proof that fairies were real. It happened on a summer’s day. Midsummer? Maybe. I woke in the bed I shared with my twin sister to find a silver ring on my ring finger. I’d never seen it before. It was a Read more…
When I was young, in my twenties, I walked past a man who had just been shot. It was on Euclid Avenue, an ugly stretch with a brown strip mall of empty store fronts on one side and a gravel parking lot on this side, where the man lay over Read more…
“Men have no standards,” my friend joked recently. His wife said, “Now, what does that say about me, sweetie? If you have no standards…” it had the air of an oft-repeated conversation and I was irritated by the complacent amusement of both the women and men in the room. “No, Read more…
When I was still unpublished, I spent a lot of time worrying about My First Line and Hooking The Reader. If my very first line didn’t grab the reader by the throat and make them incapable of doing anything other than reading on, how would I ever break in?? This… Read more…
PLOT is not ACTION. It can be easy to confuse the two. I sure have. I’ve heard great and award-winning authors summarize their view of plot as, “The stuff that happens.” Well, yes… a successful plot is the stuff that happens, but stuff happening is not, in itself, plot. I Read more…
“When do you stop revising?” A friend asked me recently. “You can stop?” was my initial response, but the truth is more nuanced than that. (And besides, that answer was Not Helpful.) At some point in my writing career – I’m going to say it was two laptops ago so Read more…
I recently volunteered to be a first-round reader at a fiction magazine. A “slush reader.” I think referring to the mountain of submitted stories as “the slush” started when paper submissions were slipped through the transoms of publishing offices, resulting in a slippery pile of envelopes the employees had to Read more…