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Play Nice with Reviews?
We now know more than we ever wanted to know about speaking truth to power. But what about speaking truth to other writers? Part of my work is to critique manuscripts, and assessing those darlings can give me hives, gastric reflux and headache. What if I tell the truth?: “This story lacks conflict. What I see here is…
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No Fooling, It’s National Poetry Month
Dedicate your time to poetry! Here’s how: “National Poetry Month was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture.” Poets.org WRITE A new poem each week, revise, revise, revise…
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Novel Writing 101
To honor my friend and fellow writer Tim Hall, whose debut novel is out. Step One–accept that you have a story to tell. Two–confront the many ways to tell it: memoir, fiction, photo montage, essays. Three–write reams to get the story out of your head onto the page. Take heart, this is what Anne Lamott (Bird by…
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Only Myself to Blame
It’s been a good week: five poems accepted for publication and acknowledged, a time-consuming project cancelled and a new poem written. Of course, I did my daily morning pages and insisted on a focus. I updated my submissions list and noted the next round of subs. But I did not tackle the long projects on my…
Karen Douglass, Author 