I just returned from a writer’s conference in San Francisco (https://sfwriters.org/), which was a decent conference with fairly high-level sessions, not Bonehead 101 as so many of them are. I had four days in the Mark Hopkins hotel at the … Continue reading
I recently attended a “pitch” conference for a week at a charming seaside town on the coast of California. Morro Bay is a fishing village and a tourist trap, stereotypically picturesque and aggressively insular, but like all such small towns, … Continue reading
I think I’m recovered from my New York Pitch Conference, a week in the city trying to learn how to pitch a novel manuscript. I came back with a mission: to re-write my manuscript, incorporating all that I’d learned. Trouble was, … Continue reading
I spent a week in New York City attending a conference on how to pitch a novel to an agent or editor. Selling fiction is the least appealing part of the writing adventure. I write because I enjoy the thrill … Continue reading
I just finished re-reading Art &Lies by Jeanette Winterson and was again elevated by her lyrical language, though unlike my first awe-struck read, about four years ago, this time I noted more over-writing and self-indulgent wordplay – not that I … Continue reading
I am grinding out sentences on my ninth novel as if it were school homework. I’ve been working on Chapter Six since the middle of September, six weeks, and I estimate I have another two weeks to go on it. … Continue reading
To the Lighthouse is a novelistic exploration of individual consciousness and of relationships in the interwar period in Britain. Woolf uses a stream of consciousness technique to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling. The narrator promiscuously jumps from … Continue reading
My new novel is developing slowly. I have 7,000 words since I started writing on August 1. That’s 500 words a day, a couple of pages, respectable, but I haven’t been feeling momentum. I think they’re “good” words, in the … Continue reading
Setting a novel in a historical period is much more difficult than I had anticipated because of the endless research. I was writing a scene that mentioned a pipe-cleaner when I stopped short: Wait! Did they have pipe cleaners in … Continue reading
As I hem and haw my way toward my next writing project, I have taken several swipes at an outline. I’m an outliner, yes. Without an outline, I’m writing word salad into a desert. I don’t always follow my outline, … Continue reading