One of the things I’ve loved the most about being a part of the Debutante Ball is getting to read books I wouldn’t normally pick up. TEMPER is quite far outside of my normal wheelhouse, but it was such a suspenseful, tense, sharp, high-speed chase of a time. Kira Rascher’s been struggling to get that perfect theater role for years. When she has the opportunity to audition for a role…
I’m so excited to welcome fellow debut author and fantastic human being Katherine Forbes Riley to the Ball this week! Aside from being an incredibly adept wizard with words, Katherine is also a computational linguist in Vermont. Katherine’s creative writing appears in the Wigleaf 2018 top 50 list, as well as numerous other literary journals, including Buffalo Almanack, from whom she received the Inkslinger’s Award for Creative Excellence. She received…
The thing about jealousy is that it’s natural. It’s normal. It happens to everyone. But jealousy is your responsibility. What you choose to do with it matters. As I told my Toddler just this past weekend: you can have your feelings, just don’t hurt anybody with them. That is to say, you feeling jealousy toward a colleague, or even a friend, is fine. You acting on that jealousy in a…
This week we’re writing about the authors we fangirl over. For me, that doesn’t just mean I love their books, but that I love them as a person – or at least the person they present – and get ridiculously excited about anything they do. Often, I’ve learned a lot from these authors – from their fiction, yes, but also from what they’ve shared online. Seanan McGuire is the first…
This week we’re thrilled to welcome to the Ball Fran Dorricott, author of the debut psychological thriller After the Eclipse! Fran Dorricott is an author based in Derby, where she lives with her family, a cat, and three dogs (one of whom weighs more than she does). In 2013 she completed a degree in American Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and from there went on…
Families are an amorphous thing. Parts of them you’re born with, parts of them you marry into, and parts of them you kinda just adopt extralegally. They grow and they shrink and they grow some more – the only thing that’s truly consistent about them is that they’re in flux. But there’s always a core, too, a heart to any family. Same is true of your writing community. Mine’s been…
Omygoodness it’s that time already?? I remember reading the Debutante Ball all of last year, waiting and waiting for that application window to open. I love writing about writing, about process, about story and worldbuilding and characters and other books. I also wanted a regular, dependable outlet during all the Crazy Wot Is Debut Year, and an opportunity to meet other authors in a similar place. I was thrilled beyond…
Are you interested in being one of the Class of 2020 Debs at The Debutante Ball? We want to hear from you! Wow. It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has flown by and that already so most of our books are out in the world! But it’s time to pass our tiaras on to the next writers of The Deb Ball. We’re looking for female or non-binary…
When I think of summer reads, I think of my youth spent staying up much too late devouring books with a flashlight or paging through books in the library while the a/c is going hard as it can. I think of the books read in one sitting, as light and satisfying as ice cream, or books read at the beach without getting (too) sunburnt. Books tucked into your backpack for…
I’ve already written before about my writing education – that I had none. Or at least no formal one. By the time I knew MFA’s were even a thing, I was three years deep into a Classics degree. But that’s okay – I’d already spent six years writing fanfiction, which turned out to be as good as an informal education. There’s a common piece of advice thrown about in the…
