During a recent book club, a reader shared how she cried while reading The Last Carolina Girl. She went on to ask if it’s hard for me to write those scenes. The short answer: yes. And it only gets harder with each round of revisions. Why? Because with each draft,
Read MoreIf you have completed a first draft of a book, congratulations! That is a huge feat in and of itself. You may be wondering what to do next. Search for agents? Write a query letter? Consider self-publishing on Amazon? Before you do any of those things, I want to draw
Read MoreEverybody wants to be an author. Okay, perhaps that is an overstatement. So, let me try again: A LOT of people want to be an author. I know this because I have had A LOT of people tell me this since I first announced my book deal. I understand this
Read MoreI fail at marinating. Perhaps part of my problem is that I can be bad at planning ahead—blame my type b personality for that one. I can balk at things like meal planning and question the benefit of marinating. It has become such a joke in my family that we
Read More5 creative writing tips learned in a cubicle I used to write about RV toilets. Fresh out of college with a creative writing degree and full of idealism, I took a job at an advertising agency. I assumed it would be a temporary gig while I wrote and published my
Read MoreI’m not going to lie; being an author is a pretty cool gig. I get to sit around in my athletic attire all day in only the company of my golden retrievers, secluded from the rest of the world as I tell stories. Sure there are those days when I
Read MoreConfession: editing makes me grumpy. Or, at least according to my fourteen-year-old’s “accidental” Christmas gift to me. Okay, perhaps I need to back up and explain myself. Here’s what happened… First of all, I’ve come to know that I love deep work. I loathe distractions. This became even more evident
Read MoreI used to believe in the mantra “no plot, no problem.” I successfully completed National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2005 with that mentality. And, while I ended the month with 50,000 words, I wouldn’t call the story developed enough to even consider it a complete manuscript. Nonetheless, I printed
Read MoreReaders often want to know where a story idea comes from. It’s a good question that authors can sometimes answer. And other times, we don’t have an explanation for the genesis either. But with my debut novel, The Last Carolina Girl, I unfortunately do know when the spark of the
Read MoreI like to write quiet stories, focused on characters. Going in-depth into their perspectives. Exploring who they are at the core. What doesn’t come as naturally to me is a page-turning, edge-of-your-seat, keep-the-reader-up-all-night plot. The question is: does a book have to be compelling? In short: yes. As someone who
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