Year’s end always brings reckoning. My inbox is full of people taking stock: of their finances, of their families’ paths through this rocky year, of…

November 2022

I’m now on the fourth draft of a story I’ve been working on for the last few years. Once the characters, plot and theme stabilized, I did a round of…

October 2022

This quote by Nayyirah Waheed haunts me nearly every day: “The thing you are most afraid to write Write that.” Sometimes it’s the usual fears. What if…

September 2022

All my life, I’ve thought of Jane Austen novels as the kind where women constrained by a society that won’t permit them any real adventures express…
Honestly, if you’re an author, you’re probably always going to be something of a creep. You can’t help noticing things about other people that set them…

August 2022

Or, lessons in divine writerly patience from Tiān Guān Cì Fú

July 2022

Or, how to keep the spark alive in the years it takes to write a novel
Or, that other extreme of writer's block

May 2022

Nearly every writer I’ve ever met is a ‘pantser,’ preferring to plot by the seat of their pants, rather than a ‘plotter’ who knows how their story will…
If you don't take your writing seriously, nobody else will

April 2022

On avoiding purple prose
We are, many of us, aware of the danger of a single story, of a single representation defining and confining us to stereotypes. When we see diversity…