James Preston “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” We’ll come back to that in a minute. Story is important. What we do is important. My guess is you believe that or you wouldn't be reading this blog. I had that knowledge driven home one year on vacation. Welcome to another installment of […]

Angela Ackerman Stories should be a true experience for readers. Like a gourmet meal, we want there to be more to them than just what is seen on the surface. This depth can be added a number of ways—through subplots, character arc, subtext, theme, and symbolism. Of them all, symbolism is one of the simplest […]

Let’s just call it … 2016 has been a whole cluster of bad. We lost some amazing artists, we’ve watched natural disasters and man-made disasters devastate communities, and we’re now experiencing massive aftershocks of an election that’s shaken all sides of the country. I’ll spare you the pity party of various personal things. Now here […]

Piper Bayard It’s December—the month after National Novel Writing Month. We blink our eyes and search around like the lights just came up in the bar. Or maybe our expressions are more like that look a cat gets when a kid puts a paper bag over it for a few minutes and then pops it […]

Susan Spann While authors often obsess about getting any agent to represent them, in reality, writers should be concerned about finding the right agent—the one whose personality, business habits, and expectations are a match to the author’s own. The author-agent relationship is a partnership. Like any business relationship, its success is heavily dependent on the […]