I recently attended the Muse and the Marketplace conference, offered by Grubstreet in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2018, I attended two conferences. Whether I attend any in 2020 will depend on time, budget, and the location of the conferences. People define being a “serious” writer in many different ways. I’ve certainly met those who think...

I don’t remember when I first formally learned about “unreliable narrators” in fiction. It was probably sometimes during junior high or high school. First, we had to learn about points of view, of course. Was the fiction written from a third-person or first-person point of view? If third person, were they omniscient? Limited omniscient?...

A review of Pink Plastic House by Kristin Garth, in anticipation of a new chapbook by her.

CN: Child Abuse. Who doesn’t dream at night of dosing her son with ipecac and then, when he goes to vomit, just... shutting the lid? (A true story about my mother)

I just spent a week in Tokyo teaching professors, post-docs, and PhD students how to write better papers for submission to STEM journals. There are a lot of rules to this, but also a certain mentality that’s changed over the years. As recently as 20 years ago, authors strove to write dense prose that...

I’m currently working on my fourth novel, and querying my third novel. None of these have been published. But finally, I have a query that is resulting in agents requesting the full manuscript. One of the main things I learned in refining this query is how much it matters (or at least seems to)...