One of the most challenging parts of assembling a good query letter--beyond the sheer difficulty of writing it--is deciding on your comps. A...

Realtors know that smart location is everything in buying or selling property. Try to sell a house that's near a busy highway or high te...

There's a kind of romance that happens between a writer and the book they have been working on for months or years. A relationship, at l...

My spouse and I just adopted a puppy. He's adorable at 14 weeks, and full of energy and sharp growing-in teeth. He is slowly, after a we...

A client told me about a recent meeting of her writing group. They discussed using present versus past tense when writing memoir. What were ...

I learned about the importance of transitions during my MFA study. One of my thesis advisers, a talented novelist, read my novel-in-progress...

Before I wrote books, I wrote stories, essays, and poems, columns and articles. Short stuff. Short stuff doesn't require that much orga...

"Who's on first?" We're not talking baseball. We're asking: Who is the power person in a particular scene? Who is the ...

Not everyone wants to pay for an MFA degree, and I didn't either, for a long time, until I started writing fiction and realized I knew n...

I'll never forget the writer who approached me many years ago, asking me to read her work. "I can't read it myself," she s...