It is a cool, slightly overcast morning. I’d like to be in my garden, planting more of the bedding plants I have waiting, puttering, pruning and plucking weeds. It has been a very long wait for spring this year, and every fiber of my being is screaming to get outside, play in the dirt, create [...]

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I awoke from a nightmare last weekend and did the sensible thing. I got up and showered off the flop sweat, crawled back in with the ToolMaster, and poked him in the shoulder — firmly, since he was the cause of my distress. “Hey,” he said with a fair degree of irritation. Then something must [...]

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In the last couple of months, I released one book and wrote another in six weeks, start to finish. (No, I don’t usually write that fast; yes, I really, really wish I had the magic recipe to make novels come that quickly and easily all the time– if I ever figure that recipe out, I’ll [...]

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We are so excited that our guest today is consulting editor Alan Rinzler. Alan has edited and published Toni Morrison, Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerzy Kosinski, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and others while working as Assistant Managing Editor at Simon & Schuster, Director of Trade Publishing at Bantam, west [...]

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I once had a client tell me she’d heard that sentences should never run more than fifteen words. To this day I have no idea where that rule came from, though it was probably from someone who either had a short attention span or had read way too much Henry James. The rule is nonsense, [...]

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Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved fairy tales, myths, legends, and fantasy. It’s something I responded to instinctively as a young reader, and something I took to easily as a young writer, too. In my imagination and my dreams, journeying to those magical worlds seemed to me as natural as breathing. Of course I [...]

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Erika Robuck’s novel HEMINGWAY’S GIRL (NAL/Penguin) was selected as a Target Emerging Author pick, a Vero Beach Bestseller, and has been sold in two foreign markets to date. Her new novel, CALL ME ZELDA (NAL/Penguin), published on May 7, 2013, and looks to be another successful blend of history, mystery and compelling prose. The book begins [...]

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Here’s a piece of advice writers are universally given: if you want to learn to write, read good books. As counterintuitive as it may sound, this is almost always bad advice. First, before your head explodes, I’m not suggesting that you don’t read good books. Heck, reading good books is probably a big part of [...]

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First, a caveat: this is a post about the craft of fiction, and I don’t have the first clue about how to teach the craft of fiction. From my years as a high school English teacher, I could teach you how to write an essay on the symbolism found in The Great Gatsby. I could teach [...]

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We’re so pleased to bring you today’s guest–long-time WU community member and Reader Unboxed reviewer, Amy Sue Nathan. Amy lives and writes near Chicago where she hosts the popular blog, Women’s Fiction Writers. She has published articles in Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times Online among many others. Amy is the proud mom of [...]

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On a recent flight to Dallas, I read a short biography of Thomas Edison put out by Time Magazine that I’d bought at an airport kiosk. I learned that Edison’s first invention was a commercial failure. He invented a vote tabulator so that votes could be counted efficiently and quickly. When he took the invention [...]

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Today’s guest is business writer and editor Tom Bentley. Tom is a published journalist and essayist (300+ articles), and the author of a short story collection, Flowering and Other Stories, published last spring by AuthorMike Ink. His 1999 short story, All That Glitters, won the National Steinbeck Center’s short story contest, and he has won many [...]

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