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Survey Results: How Writers Support Themselves

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the survey. You guys are awesome. Here are the results:

Sixty-five writers took the survey. Of those, 42% are novelists, 18% are nonfiction and/or memoir writers, and the rest are broken down below. 43% of the writers support themselves through non-writing-related jobs (see below for a […]

Holiday Gift Ideas For Writers

I am stealing this post idea directly from Sierra Godfrey, who says other bloggers have written similar posts, so I guess I’m not the only one stealing post ideas.

BOOKS

Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition

Although Sierra already mentioned this one, I’d be a bad editor if I didn’t suggest the […]

Five Ways to Murder Your Loved Ones

If you’ve been writing for a while, you’ve probably heard the expression, “Kill your darlings.” (The real expression is “Murder your darlings” and comes from Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch’s “On The Art of Writing”: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts […]

Portrait of a Model as a Young Girl

So here I am stuck up in the woods with no one and nothing to do but work on my book for four days. So far it’s going great except that I’m going to gain ten pounds because I have a houseful of junk food, and it’s raining too hard to go running. In a […]

One Reason to Buy a Kindle

This is me reading a book on the iPad at the beach. It was an overcast day, and I did discover that if I tilted it at the right angle, I could read without the towel over my head, but still, a Kindle would have been nice. Would I rather have a Kindle than an […]

The Lonely Polygamist: Review

I meant to write an “I’m going on vacation” post three weeks ago, but I got caught up packing and voila—three weeks have passed! I have lots of great posts coming in the next few weeks, but first of all here is my latest book review in the San Francisco Chronicle. Enjoy!

Why do you buy the books you buy?

I’m curious why people buy the books they buy. Because someone recommended it? Because you saw it in a bookstore and it looked interesting? Because you read a review? Because you’ve read a previous book by the author and liked it? (Below I list the last ten books I bought and why I bought them […]

Writing Groups

A note on writing groups and workshops. My work has been workshopped at least a hundred times. I’ve been in a writing group on and off since 2002, I earned an MFA in 2006, and I attended the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference in 2007—all which used the traditional workshop format of critiquing manuscripts with slight […]