Writer Unboxed

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So I’ve finally released an eBook that’s gaining some modest traction. It’s called the little book of SITCOM, and since you’ve been looking over my shoulder for the past year or so as I’ve tried to start a fire in this little self-publishing model of mine, I thought I’d share both the story of how [...]

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You should be scared to hear this, but I’ve begun dabbling in the world of stop-motion animation. Even worse: low-quality, half-assed, on-my-iPhone stop-motion animation. What does this mean? This means that I wait for my toddler to take a nap and then I frantically begin playing with his stuffed animals in peculiar positions. But wait. [...]

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Bookmarks, fridge magnets, pens – if you can’t wait to order objects that display your cover art or announce your authorial name, you aren’t alone. “Swag,” as these tangibles are known, signals to oneself and others that an author has “arrived.” It serves several other time-honored purposes within the publishing world: Can be used to [...]

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I stand before you today (okay, actually I’m probably sitting as you read this, but that sounds far less dramatic) in defense of what I think is an unfairly maligned piece of our language: the adverb. Other than the announcement that Snooki from The Jersey Shore had published a novel, I know of no other [...]

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I have to confess that I actually did make a New Year’s resolution: to (mostly) stay offline in the mornings until I get a solid block of creative work complete. As Jane Friedman pointed out in her recent column on Writer Unboxed, I needed to decide what I’d stop doing to make more time for [...]

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I keep this quote in my archives and refer to it often. Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be [...]

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Congrats to Joseph Mazzenga, whose caption got the most “Likes” in the Comments section of my December 3rd post. Joseph wins a selection of my hand-doodled notecards (to Joseph: I’ve sent you a Facebook message).

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Late at night is when the pain is the worst. The aching void. The silence. The knowledge that what once was is now gone. Forever. It’s not like we didn’t know it was going to happen. This was a love affair that we knew would end. We both knew this going in, but I don’t [...]

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Any caption suggestions? I doodle on blank cards in my spare time, just for the fun of it. If you write the winning caption, I’ll send you a bunch of hand-drawn cards from my collection! I’m going to try an experiment this time: I’m going to let YOU vote for the winner! Deadline: Dec. 16th. [...]

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I’m going to take a month off in December from this site. I need to prepare a few things (maybe even a presentation) for my upcoming novel. I’ll be back in January, but still I’m nervous about leaving y’all. So in order to cope with this fear, I’ve decided to get my wife to film [...]

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One of these days I’ll write an honest-to-goodness helpful post that will be linked to and referenced and included in MFA syllabi for years to come. In the meantime you get this – the product of a stressful month in which the O’Hara family surmounted health, dental, and relationship challenges. Since I cope by using [...]

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