“Being a writer is easy. Writing is hard.”
Cast on 28 stitches. Size 19 needles. Knit one row. I had to throw so much yarn away before I moved, thanks to the moths. Alpacas and merinos that would have felt soft and warm as they slipped through my fingers and grew row by row into something, anything. Blues and...
This is a question I'm asked from time to time by inexperienced writers, who are—quite naturally—concerned that they're not seen as copying another author or idea, or are afraid of having someone else copy theirs. I say "quite naturally," because in many areas of our...
The peculiar thing about writing a book is that sometimes you don’t know where the idea for it came from. Other times you can trace it exactly to something you saw, heard, read, researched, etc. But whatever spawned the idea, something about it made you feel as if you...
One of the things I do that might make people think I'm a little crazy is that I rewatch my favorite series, over and over again. It's partly for comfort and reassurance: I know how things will turn out in the end, and during a tough year, that's helpful. But I also...
I moved into an apartment in an old mill building in Biddeford, Maine in February of this year. Although I have a daughter, grandsons, and a brother and his family who live in Portland (twenty minutes away), I knew no one in this town. I stayed in touch, of course,...
This subject matters, whether you're a reader or a writer. Writers because it's important to understand the forces at work in the publishing world, and readers because those same forces can have a big effect on the books available to you to read. The hermetic world of...
My twelfth historical novel, The Portraitist, is coming out with She Writes Press on August 30 of this year. It’s a book I’ve been working on in one form or another for seven years. I’ve also written and published novels within the space of a single year, usually...
My Life Changed. But I Still Have a Book Coming Out. I knew something was wrong with him almost a year ago, but I didn’t know how wrong. He’d seen me through nearly eleven book launches, was always there for the triumphs and the disappointments. He read my books, he...
I happened to realize the other day that my bedroom walls are decorated with old photographs and drawings of my forebears, all of whom are no more. There’s my maternal grandmother in her high school graduation picture from 1929. My other grandmother in her wedding...
So what are you gonna do about it? First, how much do you know? What details can you tease out? Where did she live, when did she live, how old was she when all that interesting stuff was happening…. And then, if it were my great grandmother, I’d start digging into...
It's taken me a lot to get to this point. I've been a published author for over fifteen years, and I became an Author Accelerator Certified Book coach in early 2020, just before Covid hit. At that time, when coaching was all new, I thought I should split myself in two...
I've been making some courageous decisions about my books lately. The most recent of them was deciding to get a good audiobook made of my forthcoming novel, The Portraitist: a Novel of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. She Writes Press will publish the paperback and ebook on...
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