I’ve moved around a lot in the past decade, and I’ve had to cull my writing friends from a number of different sources. The first time I joined an actual writing group was when I moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia and found one through Meetup that was only a few minutes from my children’s school. In many ways, Just Write changed my life. I had started a…
I am so excited to welcome former Deb Lara Lillibridge back to the ball this week! I feel as though I’ve known Lara forever, although I suppose it’s been less than a year. She was the deb from last year who first emailed me to ask if I would like to be one of this year’s five, so let’s just say I’ve been fond of her ever since. She…
A debut year for any writer is exciting and joyful. And it can also be stressful, frightening, frustrating, and lonely. In my little corner of the world, it’s been hard for me to find other writers to connect with, although I’m lucky to have a small circle. Even if you live in a big city, though, with lots of different writers’ groups available, the odds of…
I’m not usually one for “beach reads.” I mean, I’m always reading, but I also would almost always prefer a big, heavy, literary tome to something light and funny. I see no problem with sobbing over the ending of Anna Karenina while sipping a Mai Tai on vacation. When I was eleven, I took on the task of reading The Executioner’s Song because I was looking for something…
I’ve lived in a number of different places across Canada and the United States, and I think to some extent I’ve absorbed something from each of them that colors my writing in some way, but I honestly never gave much thought to that until I sat down to write this post. The first thing that seems to influence me is being Canadian. I have a penchant for describing long,…
Like most writers, I’ve been an avid reader since the day I learned to read, and some of my fondest childhood memories are of the independent book stores I frequented with my family. Every time we visited the small town in Ontario where my grandparents lived, for instance, a visit to the bookstore was in order. My parents would let my brother and me browse for ages and…
I am not a finance person. When I think of the words “financial” and “realities” in the same sentence, my brain tries to make a little symbolic dive under a sofa. All I can do with this post is just lay it out there and be honest. I have no problem telling everyone exactly what my book finances have been so far, because I think it’s important…
Aloha. What a perfect day? A day to organize, a day to catch up, a day to relax, a day to write, and a day to read, a day to edit, and another day to read (because you really can’t have enough days to read). So the perfect day is really a week. So…. So there’s no such thing as a perfect day. I may not be able to have…
When I was in the stage of getting feedback on early drafts of this book, more than one reader told me they wished I would just come out and say precisely when and where the story takes place. “It’s obviously American,” they said. “Why not just name the town? And why not just say what year it is? Why do we have to guess?” Well, because I said…
In some ways, I really had to overcome my personality in order to write a book. I’m a hopeless introvert, so I’m still marveling at how an introvert who doesn’t really want to talk to anyone was ever able to write an entire book full of reasonably believable characters. Especially since I had to come up with a lot of things for them to say. This is a tough…
