Archives

Last week, I blogged about imitation as inspiration. On the heels of that writing exercise–which I employed all week long–I can say I’m also convinced that imitation is a [...]

I’ve been copying. That’s right. Borrowing another writer’s structure and trying to stuff it with my own words.  Actually, I’ve been doing it all morning [...]

I pride myself on being a pretty low maintenance, portable writer. After all, I specialized in moving around for three years with this writing life, and by and large my biggest “tool” [...]

Sunday afternoon I took off for a week on Oak Island, the very southern tip of the North Carolina outer banks. Being someone else’s guest and also being relatively naive about fishing in [...]

The best part about hiring a coypeditor besides being provided with peace of mind that I’ve done all I can to make my manuscript as design-ready as possible, is the fact that I learned [...]

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of learning for me, as my agent and I negotiated our way through the final amendments to the book contract. But one clause in that contract, perhaps more [...]

Coon Ridge is a little outcropping between Burnt Mountain and Woody Ridge, shown here without a label on the Polaris Cartography view of the Black Mountains. Even as a teenager I marveled at maps [...]

This is the final post in series about the long process of finding my way to a first book contract. To learn about just how many presses, how many agents, how many months and weeks and contract [...]

It’s fall here on Coon Ridge and in the rest of the Appalachians, for that matter. There’s nothing like that twinge of cool in the air and the way it lets me breathe fully, drop my [...]