19. October 2016

We all know what it's like to go into a job interview and have your potential boss say, "what's your biggest weakness?" It's sort of pointless to even ask this, because everyone knows how to play the game-- you make a strength sound like a weakness. "Oh, I just care too much!" "Sometimes, I put in more hours than I need to." "I give so much to those I'm working with that I forget to take care of myself." Basically, anything that says "I will give my life to this job." Yeah right. But what if...

14. September 2016

About a month ago, I attended a writer's retreat with some of my coworkers. When it came time for workshop, I said that I'd been playing with this story off and on for a few years, sent it out a few times, and nothing happened. I wanted to figure out how to fix it because--and then I stopped short. I don't remember how I finished that sentence. I probably said something like, "I think it's interesting," but what I actually wanted to say was, "I really love it." But that's just... I mean, how do...

05. September 2016

Reading during my teenage years heavily formed my vision of what stories should achieve. My novel, The Closing Prophecy, is YA speculative, but it's largely influenced by women's fiction, as is the majority of what I create. Women's fiction seems to be my base, and that started around 13, when, instead of reading YA about mysterious missing hamsters and terminal illnesses and first periods (YA has changed dramatically from when I was a kid), I gravitated towards fiction written by adults for...

01. August 2016

I'm currently making my way through Amy Poehler's Yes, Please. I know, I'm like two years late, but better late than never. In the introduction, Amy goes on and on about how hard it is to write a book, that it's awful, like pulling teeth. She writes about the myths of how glorious and glamorous writing is, about morning pages (screw that) and daily routines (screw that) and the image of someone being struck by the muse. She argues that writing is nothing like that. As I was reading Amy's take,...

03. June 2016

I am currently in the throws of getting my novel, The Closing Prophecy, ready for publication. I've read and re-read and caught errors missed the first five million times. I've been obsessing over the cover design and how I want the interior to look and how much it should cost and blah blah. I haven't had the energy or attention span to do much reading or support other authors. What I really need right now is a break from my own projects. So I want to hear about your projects. What are you...

11. May 2016

I want to start a series of posts where we talk about the writers and stories that made us who we are as writers ourselves. Sometimes when I return to a certain book, I'm shocked to realize how much it has informed the content I produce myself. It's easy to forget as we're taken with the latest influence in the moment, so for this first post, I want us to think back to when we were kids, to those early stories that never left us. I still remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to be a...