by Kathryn Craft I’ve written here before about the importance of community in carrying our writing careers forward and I stand by that advice. You’ve only gotten where you are because of the hands you’ve held. But no one community may be able to carry the upwardly mobile among you all the way to your goal. […]

by Tasha Seegmiller About two years ago, my husband got the idea to start a cotton candy business. We bought a machine, played around with flavors and techniques and materials and during the local Fourth of July parade 2017, we opened for business.  Not quite two years later, and we are merging that in with […]

by Lisa Hall-Wilson Shame is one of the most powerful and underused emotions in a fiction-writer’s toolbox. Shame is pervasive and common, it’s ugly and hard to capture well. Readers cheer for characters who are relate-able. They cheer for characters who stand up to bullies, who stay and fight when they don’t have to. They […]

By Margie Lawson I’ve read the same wording about tears in too many books.  Tears stream and streak, glint and glisten, flee and flow, prickle and trickle.  They slip, slide, run, roll, seemingly unstoppable. Tears blur vision, soak hair, get wiped, get blinked.  But some tears are unshed, unspent, unspilled, or unspecified. Sobs can choke and […]

by Becca Puglisi As I’m sure you’ve heard roughly a gajillion times, your story’s first pages are very important. Editors and agents typically request just a portion of your story’s opening, and potential buyers read only a sampling when they’re looking for books to buy. So whichever publishing route you take, those first pages are […]