Indie publishing involves formatting. Ugh. I was planning to write an erudite assessment of Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, because I have always disliked The Taming of the Shrew. Tyler came up with a charming “doesn’t make you want to throw up” version. But I am not feeling intellectual today. Because I spent the day formatting. No. Today […]
Collecting Benefits from Self Employment. I bet you woke up this morning thinking, “What exactly is the difference between an axiom and an idiom?” I know I did. Being able to take time to explore questions like this is one of the benefits of self employment. Actually, I was wondering specifically whether “a day late […]
“Fiction is a story someone made up.” Miss Wood tapped her desk for emphasis. “Non-fiction is fact. You find non-fiction in an encyclopedia or in a newspaper so you know it is true.” This is how my sixth grade teacher Miss Wood once explained the difference between fiction and non-fiction. I’m going to pause now […]
Finishing and Letting Go are Not the Same Things. So much of writing a novel is about beginning it – plotting, character exploration. Beginnings are optimism incarnate. But finishing has a distinct flavor too, a bittersweet tang. Today I finished novel number three. Really finished. Drafting, spelling and grammar checking, fixing sequence errors, sending it […]
A Royal Visit from a Woodchuck is an honor. Although maybe a painful one. There is no animal quite as full of himself as a woodchuck when he is sauntering into your garden to pillage. He carries himself with the bearing of a duke coming to check out his feudal holdings. Even when he climbs […]
Scary times in the Writer’s Corral. I sent a manuscript off to an editor for the first time ever and waited with baited breath to see what she said. It’s one thing to write a contemporary romance. It’s a totally different thing to let a person who reads books for a living assess what you wrote. Aaack! […]