A Writer’s Life

Yesterday I wrote about treating your writing like a business, and being professional about how you deal with the finances and tax ramifications of that business. Continuing along those lines, today I want to suggest a couple more things you can do to stay organized in your writing business. If you’re in the querying stage,…

Continuing with Encouragement Week… featuring posts from years past, each offering a little inspiration for your writing journey. I’m away from the blog, but I’ll be back next week with all-new posts. Enjoy! *** Everyone knows getting published is an uphill battle. With few exceptions, it’s a long, difficult and often frustrating road with the…

We writers tend to make a big deal about the physical spaces in which we write. There are countless blogs and websites that feature photos of writers’ workspaces, and I admit I love looking at them. There have even been entire books full of photos of writers’ desks. I guess it’s fun trying to see…

A few weeks ago, author Sandie Bricker wrote a guest post about how she followed her “writer GPS” to find the genre in which she could successfully break into publishing. There was an important lesson in the comments to that post. Sandie’s former agent, Steve Laube, chimed and and mentioned that when he’d been representing…

Last week I was corresponding with a client whose book contains a message that’s fairly edgy and in some ways, counter-cultural. He knows I totally believe in him and his book, but in this one particular email I used some cautious language. I told him we were “walking a tricky line” trying to find the…

If you follow me on Twitter you probably know I have this annoying little habit of going to the gym all the time. Either that, or getting outside for a run or a hike. Yeah, I admit it, I love my exercise. But NOT for the reasons you might think. I mean, physical health is…

The holiday season is here! Snow is falling outside my window, I’ve got my desk all decorated with evergreen garland and twinkly lights, and Pandora is playing Christmas music while I work. Gotta admit, I love this time of year. (I don’t wear reindeer-and-holly sweaters or dangly ornament earrings, in case you were wondering. No…

So NaNoWriMo is over, and all of you who participated are 50,000 words closer to a finished book, right? I’m interested in what you learned through this process. What did you learn about yourself? About writing? If you didn’t do NaNo, you can join in too. Tell us what you’ve learned about yourself through your…

Many of you have been on this pursuit-of-publishing journey for awhile now. Whether you’re just starting to write, or you’re already contracted, or you’re somewhere in between, I’ll bet there are things that have surprised you along the way. I’ve been in publishing for so long, I’m not surprised by much of anything anymore. So…