You are a writer. You may not have published a long-form work, but you write and revise, you submit, you pitch. Maybe you are seeking a literary agent. Maybe you plan to self publish. Or maybe you just write and rewrite.…
A Work in Progress: If You’re Not in a Writing Group, Find or Start One Today
In an earlier A Work in Progress I wrote about what I most missed after completing coursework for my MA in writing. To fill that gap, I started a writing group. It’s meant so much to me and been so helpful to me that I started a second group.…
An Attitude on Platitudes
Recently, my father, reading a piece of my short fiction, questioned my proclivity for unresolved, unsettling, and often sad endings. He requested that I tie things up with a nice bow and let someone in my next story live happily ever after.…
Surviving Feedback
I started my career as a journalist when I was 20 years old, working as a reporter for the social magazine Sierra Madre in Periódico El Norte, the biggest newspaper in my hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. I was finishing my major in Spanish Literature, and journalism was the closest I could find to a writing job.…
The Power and Danger of Honest Writing
Trigger Warning: Mention of Suicide Attempt
Until I woke up in the hospital in Peru on 27 February 2022, after trying to kill myself with a cocktail of Xanax and Stoli, I had been an English teacher for 22 years. I was so lucky to get intensive inpatient therapy and a better, safer cocktail of medication to regulate my brain chemistry.…
A Work in Progress: The Value of Short Fiction Contests, Even for Novelists
A group of Story Street Writers entered the NYC Midnight 100-word contest together as a fun little exercise. At midnight on a given day, participants are assigned a genre, a word, and an action, and entries must be submitted within 24 hours.…
Comics corner – writing advice from stand-up comedian Maria Bamford
Stand-up comedian Maria Bamford’s Audible original You Are (A Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-up Comedy is – well, pretty self-explanatory. The fifteen steps are all very funny and very helpful – check them out (if you have an Audible account, it’s free).…
It’s not a mishap, it’s a story
Friday, February 23, 2024, would’ve been my father’s 77th birthday. Two years after his passing and in honor of a, in the words of the bishop who celebrated the mass, recalcitrant Catholic, we celebrated his anniversary in church. It was a touching ceremony with aunts and uncles, my daughter Jimena crying as much as she did the day of the funeral, and my sister, who lives in Atlanta, on Facetime. …
Our Family Gap Year Will Derail My Writing Routine. Here’s How I Keep Up with Writing on the Road
With one child graduating from university, the second from high school, a husband retiring, and a writer who can work from anywhere, the stars aligned this spring to free up our schedules for a family gap year. Twelve months to escape the daily grind and explore new places, together.…
Fill the Chairs: How to Elevate Local Authors
“Fairytales can come true,” Frank Sinatra croons, then promises, “it can happen to you,” but does it? An author sets up a table piled with copies of her latest novel and assembles rows of chairs for the scads of people surely lining up outside the bookstore to hear her read and get her well-practiced “scrawl” on crisp title pages.…