In the Write

You can call yourself a writer if you have a need to write. That need can come from different places:  joy, sorrow, love, past trauma.  But the need does not come from here!  Blogs. Twitter. Snapchat. Instagram. Tumblr and a hundred other social media, informationally overloaded, time-sucking pleasures of the internet.  Cumulatively, the effect of our […]

 I object to obvious cultural appropriations and misuse such as “Chief Wahoo”(Cleveland Indians) and other insults to Native Americans such as the feather head-dress photo at top. I confess I didn’t think much about Princess Summerfall Winterspring on the old “Howdy Doody” show, but I was a tot then. Today the worm has turned, and […]

Say you’ve been through several drafts of a short story or even a novel. One of the final aspects of close revision should be about your  syntax. Huh?  What’s that?  Syntax is all about your sentences. It asks you to take a very close look at your prose and how it flows. “Syntax,” defined, often […]

Once you publish a novel or two, your life changes. What used to be a solitary life now becomes public.  You start to get invitations to come and say something about yourself and your writing. Invitations to speak span a big range. Small book clubs in living rooms.  Keynoting a library convention. Addressing an auditorium […]

A quote from Orson Scott Card:  “Everybody walks past a thousand stories every day.  The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them.  Most people don’t see any.” Exaggerations aside, you can see what he’s saying, and there’s lots of truth to it. It’s writers who, as Flannery O’Connor said,”look twice […]

Pretty sure it was Margaret Atwood who said, generally:  “Writing the opening chapters is exciting.  Writing the last chapters is an exhilarating rush to the end. It’s the middle part that’s hard.” If you look closely, you’ll see that she’s divided the novel into a three-part structure–which is pretty much the way screen plays are […]

I recently had to give up on something that was a dream of mine. Something I’d worked on for nearly three years, and invested a good deal of money, too.  It was a reading app called LitWeaver,  a dot com, wherein authors could deliver contemporary young adult literature directly to English teachers in middle- and […]

I wanted to share one more, very recent story of working with a “Big Six” publisher. HarperCollins has published several of my YA novels in the past, and has made good money on my titles, especially Memory Boy.  If you really want to hear about it, they’ve sold over a million bucks worth of my […]

Have I mentioned that rejection is part of the writing life?  That it never goes away, no matter how much success you’ve had?  Of course I have.  But these days I’m feeling it big time myself.  I’ve landed in that literary niche of “great reviews but doesn’t sell books.”  That latter part is relative of […]

Since my last post a full year has passed.  If “blogging” infers regular postings, then I must doing something different–and “different” is a good metaphor for the world of publishing right now.  In twelve months the worm has turned still more, and faster.  Notably, the Big Six, print publishers are even further back on their […]

“I’ve mentioned earlier in this blog my experience as a judge for last year’s National Book Awards, Young Adult panel.  It involved reading 278 novels in a short summer.  I knew I’d learn a lot about writing in the process, but was unprepared for the “hangover” effect upon my writing.  In a nutshell, the whole […]

        In 2005, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published my coming-of-age novel Full Service. Set in small town Midwest in 1965, it’s the summer when everything changes (most of have such a time) for sixteen-year-old Paul Sutton. Fresh off the farm, and from a church-going family, he takes a job at a gas […]