A Novel Idea

I’ve been immersed in researching two sub-cultures for my book.  One of these worlds is psychic mediumship.  The other is that of underground hip hop, specifically the Minnesota brand of b-boying and b-girling.  For most of the population here, it’s basically under the radar, almost invisible.  For those involved in it, both as members of [...]

En route to finding the perfect agent, I’ve found that the majority of them now accept emailed queries, only.  A few tolerate snail mail as an alternative, and, one agency  – clearly an endangered species — demands a query exclusively by post. The shift to email makes sense.  It requires no stationery or postage.  There’s [...]

I am great.  I am shit.  I am great.  I am shit. This drums in virtually every writer’s head, says Betsy Lerner in The Forest for the Trees.  In a blog post, she admits:  “I’ve never known a writer to say, I’m at the top of my game, or I killed a new chapter this [...]

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said. Peter Drucker Right about now, the hubster and eight of our friends are savoring a gourmet meal on the North Shore of Lake Superior as wild waves hit the rocks only yards from a cozy lamplit condo.  I’m thinking on and off [...]

Here, as promised, are the top twenty writing rules, cited by SCBWI keynoter, Jane Yolen, author of 300 books in virtually every genre, and condensed by yours truly: Eschew the exclamation point.  (Just think, it’s her #1 rule!!!!!!!) Go easy on the adverbs.  (She noted that J.K. Rowling is admittedly, grandly, justifiably the exception.) Don’t [...]

Decades ago, a funny woman named Lin Oliver came to Denver, where I was living at the time, and gave a group of us the skinny on a new writer’s organization she and a handful of other writers had just created in California.  Convinced there was a need for such a support group, she went [...]

Just spent the last few days at the conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators with well over a thousand other participants from 25 countries and 45 states.  A few days before departure for New York, a good friend, who is a businesswoman and extrovert, suggested I attend as Someone Else. She [...]

Woke up this morning and wondered why I’m still planning to fly to New York City on Friday.  The original plan was to bring sample pages of the novel to the annual conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).  By the time I broke it to the hubster that I was [...]

Write what you think you can’t. M.T. Anderson Today, I am diving deep into a revision of the first 75 pages because a wonderful and well-known agent at a New York agency gave my manuscript a look.  I’m feeling really lucky, despite my awareness that children’s publishing can be a “bunny-eat-bunny-world.”   Here’s why: The agent [...]

Life is nothing more than a guided dream. Jorge Luis Borges I hadn’t intended to post a second part of  “Out of the Blue,” but how could I not, when an installment of Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, arrived via email this morning, reminding me of the significance of this day in Isabel Allende’s life?  [...]