Teaser Tuesday: DEAD RELATIVES (Honeymoon Suite)

Someone brought this story up on another post and I realized that I’ve never done a Teaser of it. It’s a segment out of the middle of a finished novel called Other People’s Dead Relatives. The first chapter of the book was published as a short story by Vagabondage Press and a smaller segment of [...]

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Teaser Tuesday: HORNBEAM (Goth Grrl)

This little excerpt is from a bit further into The Hornbeam Door, after Oona has a nervous breakdown, courtesy of the voices in her head.  Rumor has it that she really had a bad acid trip, and on her first day back at school, she discovers that none of her friends are talking to her.  [...]

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Teaser Tuesday: HORNBEAM (Date Night)

Today’s teaser is from a young adult book I’m working on called The Hornbeam Door.  It feels a little weird to write something intended for teenagers, but I’m clearly tapping into the desolate weirdness of my own adolescence. *** As soon as Mom got home from work, I said, “Reese asked me to the movie [...]

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Teaser Tuesday: LIE (Olivia & the paramedic)

For those of you left wondering, “What happened with the paramedic?” after last Tuesday’s teaser, this is simply … a further tease.  What can I say?  It takes more than a few chapters for this particular incident to unfold. *** Olivia was the kind of girl who never managed to break the ice, even at [...]

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What does sex tell you about a character?

I’m rarely surprised when I encounter writers who say, “I would never write a sex scene. Just fade to black.” I’m sometimes a little surprised by readers who say, “I won’t read anything with graphic sex.” (Because frankly, reading a sex scene is easier than writing one, let me tell you.) I’m not even that [...]

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Branding…not just for cattle anymore

As soon as I found out about it, I become a fan of the blog Shrinking Violets.  It bills itself as “Marketing for Introverts.”  Just what I need. I’m sure all the teenagers and felons who watched me do condom demonstrations over the years wouldn’t believe that I’m an introvert, but I am.  The condom [...]

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Depends on what you mean by “publish” or “perish”

I know I’ll be sorry, because those people who believe deeply, truly, sincerely in the value of self-publication, they’re going to come to my blog and torment me.  Fine.  I just can’t help but write this post after the self-publishing laugh/cry fest I recently witnessed in the form of a promotional website for a soon-to-be-released [...]

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Race and Writing What You Know in Your Heart

It’s not unusual to come across the kind of discussion I found on Absolute Write the other day, in which well-meaning writers try to hash out a safe path through the minefield of racial identities.  If you’re a white writer, is the “racial default” in character descriptions necessarily white?  How do you describe characters who [...]

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Query Holiday

A lot of discussion has been raised recently by agent Stephen Barbara’s article in Publishers Weekly about how increasingly polished query letters have changed the shape of agent-prospective client interactions.  He laments, tongue-in-cheek, the passage of those halcyon days of query letters that hadn’t been workshopped to within an inch of their lives.  Of course, [...]

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The 7 words you should never use in your novel

People are weird.  (I’m sorry.  If you were expecting earth-shattering news, I don’t have that on offer today.  Check back tomorrow.) I belong to a few writing groups, some in person, some online, and inevitably I rub someone the wrong way with what I write.  Usually it’s creepy ideas or characters of questionable moral values [...]

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