Jamie Raintree Chances are, if you've spent any amount of time around other writers, you've heard of National Novel Writing Month, an online writing event that attracts hundreds of thousands of writers from all over the world each year. The event takes place in November and each participant pledges to write 50,000 words of new […]

Kathryn Craft Turning Whine Into Gold Our society as a whole, and publishing as a subculture, rewards action and achievement. The Holy Grail seems to be a book a year, and you can’t pull that off while sitting on your hands. Yet I would maintain there are at least four times in your writing career […]

Cathy Lamb I recently started golfing.My husband (nicknamed “Innocent Husband”  because the poor man can never be held responsible for what his wife says or writes), made me. He has been hoping I would golf with him for over two decades. I have resisted. Even thinking about trying to put a tiny white ball into […]

Aimie K. Runyan As an author of historical fiction, my work must—almost by definition—begin with a concept. Am I going to write a gritty saga about the women who flew as combat pilots for Russia in the Second World War (I did and it was great fun)? Am I going to write a sweeping fictionalized […]

Greer Macallister A few years ago, if you’d asked me about the building blocks of great novels, I would have yammered on endlessly about sentences. They can’t be too long or too short or all the same; they can’t be so complex or descriptive that they get in the way of the story; they are […]