Strategic Submissions: Best Practices for Your Pursuit of Writing Opportunities
The best method of getting the literary community to regard you as a serious writer and not a dilettante—even though you have yet to publish the Great American Novel or…
The Writers Group as Teacher: Lessons in Showing Up
A good writers group isn’t defined by rules. It isn’t defined by size. A writers group is working when it teaches you how to read and how to revise, and…
What’s So Bad About Being a Monster?
What I liked about monsters was never that they taught me to love my body. If anything, that would have reproduced the same representational problem in a slightly more gothic…
Five Things Fan Fic
Five Things... is a fanfiction writing form or structure that originated in Smallville fandom in 2001 with the fic Five Things That Aren't True by Basingstoke. The format requires a…
The Five Things Essay
An all-purpose writing prompt to help you find your voice, lose your voice, beat writer's block, or figure out what the hell you want to write about in the first…
Women with same health conditions as men ‘less likely to be offered active treatment’
Women with the same medical condition as men are less likely to be offered treatment such as surgery, a stent or a strong painkiller, research has found. A review of…
The Self-Taught Writer: Crafting a Bespoke Education
On the book tour for my debut novel, the question I was asked at every event was why I did not give up—even as it took me seven years to…
Writing the Libretto: The Art and Music of Poetic Collaboration
None of the tactical or financial considerations above matter much the first time you step into some old church somewhere, to hear, for the first time, a choir rehearse your…
“The City of Our Lady Queen of the Angels on the river Porciúncula”, Tony Duquette
For the bicentennial of the city of Los Angeles, “The City of Our Lady Queen of the Angels on the river Porciúncula”, Tony Duquette, a native son, created a gift…
Creating Without Fear: How to Quiet the Inner Critic Through Generative Writing
For over a decade I have participated in a group that meets once a month; typically there are five or six of us. Over the years we’ve honed this process…