Nikki, who travels a lot, took one of my writing workshops and recently emailed me with a great question:  how do you find a writing grou...

We all need inspiration.  Writing can be a solitary, even lonely, process, often discouraging.  Thanks to my student Mary for this excellen...

One of my students from Canada recently contacted me after the third small press rejected her memoir manuscript.  The publisher was serious...

Although I don't recommend spending much time on the legal aspects of publishing until you are close to that long-awaited time, there a...

When I was shopping my first novel,  Qualities of Light,  to publishers, along with the rejections, I received an incredibly valuable pie...

Beyond the book-writing process itself, the reason we all do this, there's the need to stay sane about the piles and files and folder...

Publishing is an interesting game.  Like all business owners, some publishers are wary of risk.  They want books that adhere to tried and t...

Books become unwieldy fast.  Unlike a poem, essay, or short story, a book may generate thousands of pages by the time it's revised do...

Your scenes have voltage, electric current, for readers.  But in most novels and memoirs, there are layers of electricity, because there ar...

Candace is writing a memoir.  Her characters are the opposite of talkative.  She took my online dialogue class earlier this year and learne...