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 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 MoreWhen I was young, I was obsessed with the notion of seeing through other people’s eyes. Literally. I wondered how others saw the world. Did they see colors in the same way I did? What if blue to them looked different than it did to me? I wanted to find
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