Someone asks what your book is about, and you freeze. You start a sentence, abandon it, start another, and three rambling minutes later you have somehow said both too much […]
Publishing
Literary Citizenship: How to Show Up for Other Writers
I once gave a reading for my first book where exactly five people showed up. Five. It was awkward. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I remember those people, […]
How To Know You’re Ready for a Developmental Editor
There comes a point in revision when it can get really hard to see your own book clearly. Maybe half of the manuscript feels solid and the other half is […]
Titling Your Book When Nothing Feels Right
Finding the right book title can feel strangely difficult, especially when you’ve lived with the manuscript for so long. My favorite strategy is to go looking for the title inside […]
Writing a Sequel and Pitching a Series
The moment a story grows past the borders of a single book, a whole new set of worries arrives. How much of the first book do you carry into the […]
When Your Manuscript Is Ready to Query
There is a particular kind of paralysis that hits writers at the threshold of querying. You have the manuscript. You have the agent list. And somewhere on your desk sits […]
The Long Game of a Writing Career
I’ve been doing a lot of math around this lately, thinking about what a writing career actually looks like over time. Not the big debut-novel fantasy with the six-figure advance, […]