Run, don’t walk

I would never know as much about publishing or the business of being a writer (both the writing side and the business side) if it weren’t for two amazing blogs, those of Diana Peterfreund and Ally Carter. First of all, Diana’s new book in the super-fun Secret Society Girl series, Rites of Spring (Break), came [...]

Watching my life explode (in a good way)

Wow, this is going to be a very, very busy weekend for me. One of the things I love about living in New York (the thing that cancels out all of the worries about rent and bills, the frustration with tourists, the cold winters and humid summers, the way you hemorrhage money just walking down [...]

The hard part

Wow, where the hell have I been? Tumbling, for the most part. You can always catch up with me over there, although what you read might be disproportionately about James McAvoy, but you don’t mind that, do you? Great! The other answer to the above question is: writing. Yes. I am writing. Joyfully. Ecstatically. Quickly. [...]

Boys v. Girls–who’s the hero?

This is really interesting: right on the heels of my post a couple of days ago about the female YA writer’s responsibility to write strong young women comes this post from Guys Lit Wire (an excellent blog that shows boys do read!) about whether or not young men need weak women in the fiction they [...]

Writing young women

For the past few days I’ve been struggling with this (long, and growing ever longer) post about the term “voice” and what it means in all these different contexts and situations. I eventually plan on posting it, but not until I can get a very firm grasp on what I’m trying to say, so in [...]

Fear and loathing

I’m not very secretive about the fact that up until quite recently–say, five months ago, about–I wasn’t very happy. I wasn’t your typical “I’m a tortured artist” student writer, but living at home the year after college, working in textbook publishing and commuting two plus hours a day and realizing every Monday that the group [...]

Theraquery

God, puns/portmanteaus with the word “query” in them are hard. Lesson learned! Anyway, you know how querying is the first step to getting an agent? Well, sometimes, despite how hard your project rocks or how good a writer you are, your query sucks. Don’t feel bad, so did mine, I’m pretty sure. But the very [...]

It’s a hit

So last night I went to the Rilo Kiley show at Terminal 5, which is, as it turns out, like, right next to the West Side Highway. Walking to the venue was sort of like walking to the end of the world? I felt sort of like we might fall off Manhattan, but we didn’t! [...]