Like pretty much everyone, I’ve been in a bit of a funk, and the end of the year means heaps of melancholy, hooray! On that note, I’d say the absolute best Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because it pokes at that holiday sadness and acknowledges loss, which we’ve experienced so much […]
Writing Goals
The Age of Success
I was at a party recently where a friend and I toasted our recent professional successes, when she said “I love the 40s!” She was referring to our ages, not the decade. Since my last post, I had a birthday and turned the calendar to a new year. These events happen on the same magical evening […]
Living (and Writing) Dangerously in the New Year
I’ve just read a wonderful essay by Tom Spanbauer titled “Dangerous Writing” in Poets & Writers. It’s a fitting piece to contemplate as I sit here on this early January morning, the kids packed off to school after a long break, the Christmas tree looking sad in the corner in its nest of fallen needles. […]
Write More, Write Better: The Writing Resolution to End All Writing Resolutions!
My birthday is on New Year’s Eve, and oh boy, there’s a lot of pressure there, double the pressure I might say, to examine a whole year’s worth of accomplishments and shortcomings and look onward with either the rosy glasses of optimism or the very, very dark glasses of pessimism, depending on how many champagne […]
The Most Frequent Piece of Writing Advice I Received Last Year–and Why I’m Ignoring It
In 2013, I took chances with my writing, threw my hat into the air a la Mary Tyler Moore and yelled into the wind with an unusual (for me) joie de vivre, “Markets be damned! I’ll write whatever I want! I’ll write whatever makes me happy!” The result? Good things, dear reader, good things, but […]
Carve that Tofurkey! A Writer Approaches the Grown-up Table
November has been kind to me, even after I went around publicly bad-mouthing it (I’ve pledged myself eternally to October), and given the season, I feel the need to say thank-you, to the editors, fellow writers, family and friends who indulge me in this creative endeavor. This month, I had fiction published in The Rumpus, which […]
Redesigning my writing, my life, and my closet
For the past year, I’ve been rewriting my debut novel, “Come As You Are.” And I do mean re-writing. I had completed many surface revisions in the years prior, had pursued agents thinking that, the next one I contacted would be the one, all the while pushing down the nagging thought that my book might […]
Hitting Bottom
I gave up on my debut novel sometime over the summer. I’d written, re-written, queried agents, gotten requests for fulls, but no offers of representation, only scant comments alluding to how nicely it was written (Then, why don’t you want it? Arrrghhh!) and brief, sometimes confusing, allusions to what wasn’t working. I cut scenes I […]