A year ago, I wrote two posts for Writer Unboxed on the subject of troubling developments on the publishing front, both concerned with restricting access to certain books and subject matters: Good Intentions and the Pathway to Hell, Part 1: Book Bans and Good Intentions and the Pathway to Hell, Part 2: Sensitivity Readers. These two phenomena mirror...

photo adapted / Horia Varlan Thanks to the 24/7 information kiosk that is the internet, anyone with a smart phone can now become a lay doctor. This can be handy if you wake up in the middle of the night with a stabbing pain and learn that the burst appendix you feared was probably just gas. But for a while now, I’ve been wondering if immediate access...

I’ve been in a funk lately. I probably should have expected it. This always seems to happen when I spend time around those I consider writing giants. Heroes, maybe. And I recently attended the Texas Library Association’s annual conference, where I joined other authors promoting our new books, meeting librarians, signing Advance Reader Copies, and...

This year I decided to try my hand at screenwriting. I didn’t think it would be radically different, and in a way, I was right. Everything I’d learned about character and plotting gave me a leg up on initial creation. But when it came to actually writing the story, in that format, the difference was mind-blowing. Here are the biggest takeaways I’ve...

As a young writer, I worried so much about my ideas. I worried that I’d never come up with any that were special enough to build a novel around; I worried that if I did come up with one, someone else would “take” it. Several decades in, I now have a more balanced view, which is this: the main concept of a book, its idea, may be important, but it...

You know what it’s like: you carve out time to write, sit down at your desk with your favorite notebook or software and…your mind draws a blank. Or perhaps you’re a swirling vortex of story ideas, plot problems, anxiety about whether your writing will be ‘good enough’. So you put off writing until you’ve completed all those suddenly-important tasks...