“Trajectory” is one of my favorite words in the English language. It encompasses the entirety of history, drawing lines from event to event until the dawn of human awareness leads to my fingers typing these keys at this moment. That’s all a story is­, an arc starting on the first page and ending on the last.   An Arc in All of Us So what’s your story? Where does your arc begin and which barriers did you bounce from to become who you are? We were all born as cute but completel

When I think back to the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I remember time more than anything. The entire world slowed down. For some, it was agonizing. For others, it was fatal. I’d been working as a freelance copyeditor for around eight years by then, so my paying job filled some of the time vacancy. Keeping a seven-year-old entertained took up some of the rest. With what was left, I wrote a short story and the first draft of a fifth novel. As detailed in a previous

I generally don’t write reviews. We live in a world where too many people give their opinions about everything they love and, more often,...

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before (I read enough of my own writing without going back through previous posts), but I currently...

A writer friend recently told me he’d found his voice. In the way he said it—eyes wide and hands gesturing with a manic energy—it was...

In previous posts, I detailed how I wrote my first book, got conned by a pretend agent, and self-published The Road Cain Walks  out of...

Writing a novel is a balance of art and craft. The first draft sets your right-brained creativity loose on the page to create worlds out...

Your second draft will feel different from the first. Instead of a blank page, you’ll have an entire story to elevate to its next level....

For me, and I believe many authors, the most difficult and important lesson about writing is how to revise. When I first started, I...

I’ve written a book no one’s read.   No, I don’t mean The Road Cain Walks  ( almost no one has read that) but the book that came next....

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but a better side effect is its ability to pull you out of your head to see things with fresh eyes....

In his book Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, Matt Bell refers to the first draft as the “exploratory...

Writing a book is like preparing a meal, if you had to plant the seeds for every ingredient and nurture them to grow. Lucky for all of...

My first substantial book idea came in the summer of 1999 while I was working at an ice cream shop in the North Carolina mountains. I’d...

Ah, yes. The obligatory author blog. We do this for the chance of getting an audience before we’ve earned one and just possibly catching...