PROJECT MAYHEM

In the fall of 2016, Melanie Crowder and I met for the first time. We'd known each other on line ( I reviewed her first novel, PARCHED, ...

Photo by: Marco Ottobelli, Source: Wikimedia Commons This fall, I was up to my eyebrows in work commitments with very little time to wri...

When I was in elementary school in Argentina, we didn't read from novels, except for the time the teacher read us Dailan Kifki  (about a...

Have you ever been saddened by the thought that you've already read  all of your favorite childhood novels, and you'll never agai...

I'm forever reading books from other writers about the craft of writing. Writing is solitary in many ways. I'm always looking for  c...

I have to confess, I put little stock in personality tests. They seem too generic, like magazine horoscopes that, with a little finag...

I'm a natural planner, but over the past year or two, I've been trying to loosen up and just write, as I've shared here befor...

My winter vacation comes to an end, and with it the end of a binge -- not the usual holiday eating indulgence (although plenty of Christmas...

"Sea captain in storm," illustration  by N.C. Wyeth  from The Rakish Brigantine We all know that feeling. The early morning ...

Photo courtesy: Moving Picture World Wikimedia Commons It was just before Christmas two years ago and I was on the phone with my agen...

I was reading HARRIET THE SPY the other day and was absolutely smitten with Harriet's writer's game from the beginning of the boo...

Story beginnings have been tricky for me. When I started editing with my agent, that was one of the first and hardest things I had to wo...