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Guest Post—Janice Hardy

Today we have a guest post by author Janice Hardy, whose novel, BLUE FIRE, the second in the fantasy trilogy THE HEALING WARS, hit stores last week. A long-time fantasy reader, Janice always wondered about the darker side of healing. For THE HEALING WARS, she tapped into her own dark side to create a world […]

The Editing Hour: Creative vs Academic Writing

When editing and critiquing submissions, the academic in me wants to copyedit every sentence until it’s grammatically and typographically perfect. That means, if I’m following the Chicago Manual of Style, I may want to add a comma before “and” in a series: “I love ice cream, cake, and pies.” Or I may want to make […]

What is your writing process?

My last post got me thinking about different ways to begin a project. When I’m advising new writers on how to begin a memoir, I tell them to think of an event and just sit down and write it as a scene (or in essay form if they aren’t ready yet to write scenes). Then […]

Memoir Monday: Narrator, Character: The Two “Yous”

Today we have a guest post from Rachel Howard, author of the memoir The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, described as “enthralling” by the New York Times. Her personal essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her advice is quoted extensively in […]

Equal Parts Criticism and Praise?

In the comments section of my post on How to Critique Other Writers’ Work, a debate ensues. When using the sandwich approach (two slices of positive feedback with a glob of criticism in the middle), do the positive and critical parts of your sandwich need to be equal? If a manuscript needs a lot of […]

How to Critique Other Writers’ Work

A post by my friend Sierra about her toxic critique group inspired me to remind people how to give critiques of other writers’ work in a writers’ group or workshop.

The sandwich method always works best: Start by saying something positive, followed by your constructive criticism, and then end with another positive comment. The reason […]

My Writing Journey

Some of my earliest memories are of my mom and dad reading books—my dad political fiction and biographies and my mom historical fiction and romance novels. I think my mom spent every minute she wasn’t cooking a meal or cleaning the house lying in bed with a book. At the age of six I remember […]

Memoir Monday: The Metaphor

A hallmark of literary fiction and memoir that distinguishes them from genre fiction is figurative language. While genre fiction (mystery, sci-fi, chick lit, fantasy) focuses mostly on plot and narrative, literary fiction focuses more on character and style, and style is often achieved through the use of fancypants language like metaphors and similes. I am […]

Link Love

It’s been three weeks since I posted links! So here we go …

In random tech/social media news: Here are 10 Tips for being awesome online, a post on how to get more Twitter followers, and the best book editors on Twitter.

In all things iPad: From the New York Review of books, the iPad […]

Memoir Monday: Author, Narrator, Character

When I was in my MFA program taking my first creative nonfiction writing workshop, my professor commented on the difference between the author, the narrator, and the character of a book and then rattled off the difference between the three. “Huh?” I said. And she rattled it off again. “Huh?” I don’t know if she […]