Writer Unboxed

Today’s guest is bestselling Kindle author Kathleen Shoop. Her second historical fiction novel, After the Fog, is set in 1948 Donora, Pennsylvania. The mill town’s ”killing smog” was one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, triggering clean air advocacy and eventually, the Clean Air Act. Kathleen’s debut novel, The Last Letter, sold more than 50,000 copies and garnered multiple awards in 2011, [...]

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Dear Fellow Sandwich Generationer: When you found out you’d become an official caregiver for two generations of people (one older, one younger), and hence a member of the “sandwich” generation, did the news come via a phone call? Mine did, as I sat writing in the deceptively soft, grey light of a winter morning. It [...]

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Truth: Writers sit. A lot. We sit and type. We sit and edit. We sit and read. We sit and dream. We sit while sifting through Twitter and Facebook posts, and while digesting blogs. And then we sit and type some more. It probably goes without saying that it’s important to have a decent setup [...]

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In third grade, they made us learn how to juggle. We started with scarves, because they have good hang time in the air, and they don’t make any noise if — okay, when – you drop them. So picture a room full of 8 and 9 year olds throwing these dingy, neon-colored squares of cloth all [...]

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I am so distractible. Dealing with that aspect of myself is one of my greatest challenges as a writer. Though my doc has assured me that I do not have an adult version of ADD, I’ve wondered a time a two. Being distractible can be caused by a whole slew of things—like genetics, parenthood, stress, [...]

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First, a disclaimer. Sometimes I pretend I’m an MD who has specialized in whatever medical issue happens to be going on in my midst. Last week at church, for instance, when my friend mentioned that earlier that day, she had slipped on her stairs and bonked her head, I became a Head Injury Specialist. As [...]

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The cold & flu season has hit me pretty hard this year, and we’re not even into winter yet. My family has gone through more boxes of tissues in the past six weeks than the average elementary school classroom does in a year. As soon as we got over one thing, something else hit. I’ve [...]

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I have finally turned in a final draft of my next novel, The Garden of Happy Endings. It has been a bear. Not kidding. I know that I whine about all of them, but this one really was hard. It was a subject I have not tackled before, and the narrative required a lot from me, and [...]

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In my writing classes, I often suggest to writers that they turn off the internet until they have written their pages for the day. Better yet, turn it off completely on a regular basis and do other things. This has become more and more challenging for all of us. More and more of our world [...]

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Howdy, all! Harry here. Seeing how busy Pack Leader (PL) was, I offered to jump in and write this month’s contribution for her. Not that it was easy to get the gig. ‘Harry!’ At my suggestion PL was all surprise. ‘You can write?’ ‘What do you think us dogs do all day while you’re staring at [...]

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As you might have noticed, I’m a great believer in balance for writers—good food, modest amounts of exercise like walking and yoga and swimming to keep all the organs and joints oiled and moving, plenty of sleep and refueling the well with hobbies and travel and such things. But sometimes life just doesn’t leave a [...]

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If you’ve noticed I spend a lot of time talking about handling writerly fear, it’s because at heart I’m a big chicken. The past few days have been no exception. (Buck-buck-buuuuuck.) In fact, all week I’ve felt the Internal Editor’s breath on the nape of my neck, danced one step ahead of his grasping, bony [...]

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