When I first heard the words “project manage" and "your writing” in the same sentence, my head almost exploded. I'm the kind of person who literally cries when faced with a complicated spreadsheet. The first time someone asked me about a pivot table, I almost had a heart attack. And no, I'm not...
How do you decide what to write? I get this question a lot. I think people who are deciding if they want to write a book spend a lot of time thinking about the external landscape—trends, state of the publishing industry, what agents want, what’s hot on one bestseller list or another. And look....
I’m one of those writers who has to continually psych myself out to get work done. It’s not that I don’t love writing—like, the actual act of writing. I do. I’ve always loved it. When I’m not doing it I have withdrawal. Hence the whole pursuing the writing career thing. But when I feel like the...
Once, in a job interview, I was asked how or when I knew that I could make a living as a writer. It wasn’t a question I’d thought about in advance. I could’ve answered in a multitude of ways, talked about my passion for books and making up stories and creating worlds that drew people in, made...
This is what I posted on my LinkedIn page to ring in the new year: Three things I'm NOT doing this year: Efforting (also known as making things harder than they need to be!) Overthinking Doubting myself I didn’t even think much about these things, honestly. I didn’t plan them. I didn’t spend the...
This past weekend was the New England Crime Bake. It’s a writer’s conference that’s local to the Boston area. It’s also a special conference for me, because it was the one I found when I first Googled “mystery writer conferences” more than 20 years ago when I decided that I was going to write...
Happy NaNoWriMo! It’s a writer’s favorite time of the year. November is National Novel Writing Month, the (somewhat insane) month where writers across the world decide to write a 50K word novel in 30 days. Yes, it sounds insane. But it’s also effective. Setting a goal like that is powerful....
How do you know if you have a creative block? It sounds like a simple concept. A variation of writer’s block, even. But where writer’s block is usually defined as unable to make progress on a writing project, I think of creative blocks a little differently. When the simple thought of putting a pen...
