I really want to write a rant to all the devastations of the day: the Kavanaugh vote in the Senate, the FBI’s incomplete investigation, the senator from Maine’s weak speech justifying her vote against women, the Senate’s dismissal and nullification of Dr. Ford’s courage. But I have to write for the Debs, it’s that time of the week where the Debs must cull their thoughts for the topic at hand….
Chronicles of an X-American (part 1) The best training is to read and write, no matter what — Grace Paley I’ve always been a poet, and it’s always some tributary of poetry that I return to when I have my teeth, metaphorically, kicked in. I started writing poems, mostly nature poems, when I turned nine. I was fast with my first drafts and slow to revise. Only my fifth-grade…
Those of you who read my post last week may remember that most of it was reminiscing about my childhood love for L. M. Montgomery’s heroine, Emily Starr, and how my obsession with her eventually inspired me to write the book that is now my debut. Since this week we’re all blogging about “the path to publication,” I titled my little piece with one last reference to Emily….
A Circuitous Route: The reflection of the world is blues, that’s where that part of the music is at – Jimi Hendrix I have no way to express how stunned I am, sitting here today, holding my newly hatched ARCs. It is surreal to see this book in galley form, it is surreal to see my family hold my debut novel in their hands. By all accounts I should…
Debuting is hard. This past year has felt, in many ways, like a crucible of anxiety. There’s so much build-up, so many expectations, and then such detritus left behind when the rush ebbs away. For someone already inclined to fret, this pretty swiftly became a Problem, and so a lot of the past year has been spent learning new techniques for managing my instincts for self-flagellation. Last week, my extended…
“So tedious is this dayAs is the night before some festivalTo an impatient child that hath new robesAnd may not wear them”–Juliet, Romeo and Juliet So tomorrow’s the day. I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was 11. I’ve been working on this book for six and a half years. And tomorrow, it becomes real. Really, truly real. Is it okay to admit I sort of don’t know what…
I spent months dreading my edit letter. One thing I excel at in particular is imagining the worst possible outcome in any situation, and then obsessing over it at two in the morning. You may think two o’clock is an inconvenient time to obsess over edit letters and other things, but I’m here to tell you that is a very fine time indeed. First of all, no one else is…
Self-care is not a thing I am great at. High-functioning anxiety means that I have a lot of trouble relaxing, and I feel guilty about it any time I even get close. There’s always something I should be doing, after all. Certainly always something else I could be doing. I try to absorb the good advice out there about self-care, and I try to take heart in inspirational aphorisms, but there’s…
I listened to a woman read a chapter from her romance novel about gay male truck drivers. Within a few minutes, it became glaringly obvious that she knew nothing about gay men or truck drivers. I was incensed—this was my community she was writing about so badly—but I was also chagrined. I was reminded of my own 300-page gay romance novel I had written several years before. Like the author…
My emergence as a writer and a mother occurred nearly simultaneously—I was suddenly flooded with stories when I was pregnant with my second child, and my oldest was two years old. Writing for me has always involved coping with distractions of the small child variety. Yet, I earned two college degrees and wrote over one thousand pages while mothering two small creatures over nearly a decade, and I like to…
