There’s an online writing activity I like about as much as having someone else floss my teeth—posting the first line of a story in internet forums to receive critique from whoever’s willing to help. This practice is common on Reddit; I’ve also seen these threads in Facebook groups that are otherwise valuable places for writers…
People love spooky stories—from cozy-creepy to hard-core horror. As a reader, it’s exciting to see how story people react when put in danger, to indulge our curiosity without real world consequences, to experience fear from a safe place. As with humor, horror works by subverting the familiar. In comedy that might come from an insertion…
I learned this week that Marie Curie’s notebooks are radioactive and will be for another 1,500 years. If you’d like to get your hands on them at the Musée Curie in Paris, you’ll need to wear protective gear and sign a waiver. So, since notebooks were on my mind, I stopped to give them further…
[You can check out the first Mother/Daughter Book Club post if you’re interested in reading thoughts from me and daughter Evelyn on Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, and This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The second installment is all about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara…
Do I even need to talk about why the opening pages of your book are capital “C” critical? I doubt I do. Writers are readers, and you know how you either fall into a book or lean away from it, and then quit it, usually quickly. As an editor and writing teacher, I’ve spent years…