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POINT OF VIEW: Finding the Joy in Writing

Joy in Writing - Deposit Photos

Sometimes I forget that I got into this whole writing gig because I love writing. No, not just love it. Need it, like an addict needs his fix. I’m not happy if I’m not writing. And yet, lately, I’m not happy when I am, either. I blame a few things: My never-ending agent search, which brings me fresh, usually bland-and-devoid-of-meaning rejections every few days My “other job” workload, which keeps me from concentrating on my writing as much as I’d like to My current slog through the third novel in a trilogy, after having taken a wrong turn somewhere in … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Feeding My Writer Brain

Books on a Plate - Deposit Photos

It’s been forever since I sat down with a good book and just read the hell out of it. I’m a compulsive worker bee, and these last five years have not been kind to our business, requiring ever more of my time, focus, and energy just to try to keep things running with my husband Mark Reading is one of the things that had to go. There just wasn’t enough time. It’s funny. Writing a novel used to seem like such a daunting thing. Now reading one does. As writers, we feast on words. We absorb them from the world … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Not Talking About Writing

Man Staring Out Window - Deposit Photos

I am NOT talking about writing today. I need a break from the rat race. From the publishing business. From the endless screaming into the void, and the emptiness it makes me feel inside. So instead, I’m going to talk about frappuccinos friends and freedom. Saturday was my Immunization Day (or Liberation Day, as one of my friends calls it) – two weeks after my second shot of the wondrous Pfizer elixir. There’s a strange sense of relief, this weird realization that I *can* go places, can do things again that I haven’t been allowed to do for fourteen months. … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Book Birthday

book birthday - dropnauts

It’s a very special day for me. Today’s my first new novel release since I left Dreamspinner, and since before the pandemic hit. I submitted Dropnauts to Pitchwars in 2019, and when it didn’t snag me a mentor, I put it out on the agent circuit for about a year. When it finally came back, limping and exhausted, to my doorstep, I picked it up and held it close. Both of us were beaten up by the experience. I sucked it up, and dove back into it, determined to make it shine.In the process, I rediscovered why I loved this … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Managing Imposter Syndrome

Imposter Syndrome / Mask - deposit Photos

I try to stay strong. I try to project optimism into the world, because that’s what I want to come back to me. But damn, sometime’s it’s hard. Today I am struggling with my IC – my inner critic, but rather than wallow in all the messages it’s giving me, I thought it would be better to share the ways in which I deal with it when I’m feeling like the fake-est phony who ever lived. So here are my strategies for coping with imposter syndrome, in no particular order. I hope they’re helpful to you, too: Reread Some (Good) … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: On Aging and Writing

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Today is my fifty-third birthday. When I was younger, someone who was my current age was old. They dressed in slacks and cardigans, walked a lot slower, and ate things like green beans and beef stroganoff. Now that I’m fifty-three, it doesn’t seem so old anymore. Part of this is the Boomers’ fault – they refused to act their age, and brought their jeans and workout routines and chopped salads with them into their golden years. Being fifty-three now isn’t what it was four decades ago. And part of it is that I just don’t feel it. I vividly remember … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Publishing Industry

Stress - Deposit Photos

Joel Arellano asked me to talk a bit about “Dealing with the volatility of the publishing industry.” I’m going to go a step beyond that and talk about the industry in general. I love publishing. I have been a book fanatic since I was a little kid, and always wanted to be a published author. When I was in my teens, it was a lot harder. There weren’t nearly as many publishers, and the big ones had the gates locked down tight. Sure, most took open submissions back then, but that was basically an invitation to languish in the slush … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Dropnauts – Making the Perfect Cover

Dropnauts cover wrap

Designing a cover is hard. My first such effort, years ago, was limited by my skill at manipulating things in Photoshop, as well as my lack of expertise in finding good images to work with. The latter still takes me the longest – I have to really consider the story as a whole and think about what might represent it. And then I have to find it. That often takes hours and hours, paging through stock photo sites and following “More Images Like This” rabbit holes when I see something I like that’s not quite right. I’ll often have ten … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writers Who Inspire Me

Inspiration - Deposit Photos

Fan Joel Arellano recently asked me what writers inspired me. Every author writes from a font of knowledge and a stew of weird ingredients created from a life’s worth of experience – where we grew up, how we were raised, and what we consumed over those (for me) long 52 years now. But one big piece of this is the other writers we have read. So here, in no particular order, is a non-comprehensive list of some of the writers who have inspired me, and why. Sherri S. Tepper: I first encountered Ms. Tepper’s work in the supermarket checkout line. … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Reworking/Extending an Old Story

go back - deposit photos

Today I’m answering a fan question from Joel Arellano… Which of your works would you extend or rewrite? I’ll start with the rewrite one. In general, I don’t like to go back and mess with my finished work too much. But I often do a light-to-heavy rewrite for most of my shorter work when it goes out of print and I re-release it. For instance, Homecoming, one of my earliest published works, got a “smoothing” rewrite, incorporating some of the things I’ve learned since, like not taging every utterance with “he said” and “she said,” and I also added a … Read more