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About Liz Michalski

Liz Michalski's (she/her) first novel, Evenfall, was published by Berkley Books (Penguin). Liz has been a reporter, an editor, and a freelance writer. In her previous life, she wrangled with ill-tempered horses and oversized show dogs. These days she's downsized to one husband, two children and a medium-sized mutt.

Recent Posts by this author:

  • Root Down and Rise Up
  • The Anti-Doom-Scrolling Diet (Think Tacos)
  • Sea Glass
  • How To Time Travel
  • My Superpower is Slacking Off
  • Biting the Bullet — Tracking my Writing Habit
  • An Introvert Walks Into a Writing Group …
  • Blow It Up
  • Bee Still My Writing — Why and How I’m Taking Time Off
  • Peanut Butter Plus Chocolate Equals Better Writing
  • What to Read When You’re Not Reading Books
  • Let Your (Sub)conscious Be Your Guide

    • Root Down and Rise Up

    By 32 Comments

    Like all your Writer Unboxed columnists this week, I’m writing this in advance of the inauguration, a time of stress and worry and hopefulness and joy. We don’t know what will happen. And not knowing, not having control, is terrifying. In these days, it’s hard to concentrate. It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to write.

    In yoga, there’s an expression: “Root to rise.” It means, essentially, to start from a solid foundation, but whenever I hear it I think of trees: Dark green pines forming a cathedral against a winter-white background, leafy oak branches framed against a summer-blue sky, slender birches standing like columns along a lake. And somewhere, deep below the earth, a tangle of roots holding fast.

    Root to rise.

    In times of turmoil, the outdoors has always been a sanctuary for me. And during this past year, I’ve watched as more people have joined me. There’s a comfort to be had from fresh air and sunshine, from wind and rain, even from cold and snow. The weather may be different from day to day, but the environment, the trees and the rocks and lakes and the sky, the bones of our world, change so slowly as to be almost constant to our eyes. That constancy is reassuring. It tells us subconsciously that no matter what is happening, tomorrow is another day. The sun will come up in the morning and go down in the night and the world will keep on spinning.

    Root to rise.

    So in days of darkness or despair, when the words will not come, get yourself outside, into the natural world. Hike a trail. Walk the beach. Set out a blanket in a park or your backyard. Look up at the trees. Notice the shade of green, the veins that run through each leaf, the crisp, sharp scent of the evergreen needles. Watch how the wind blows through them, how the boughs whisper and sigh together. Close your eyes and listen to the earth’s lullaby.

    Root to rise.

    Take a notebook with you, on those days when you cannot write. Use it to describe the texture of the bark beneath your fingers — rough, hard, dry for the maple. Smooth for the birch. Sticky for the spruce. Capture how the long strands of weeping cherry dance in the wind, the way its blossoms shiver and shake, twirl in the sky like pink confetti. Draw a word picture of the twisted branches of the Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick, the slick straightness of the American beech. [Read more…]

    The Anti-Doom-Scrolling Diet (Think Tacos)

    By 27 Comments

    Anyone else feel as if they’ve aged a decade in the past year? (Make mine a century.) The continual stream of bad news, the need to doom-scroll Twitter to keep up with the latest dumpster fires, the constant refreshing of reliable information feeds has taken a toll. Not just on my hair (gray), my once-healthy diet (now composed of  sugar and other substances), but also on my ability to read, relax, and refill my creative well. To add insult to injury, so many of the activities we as writers … [Read more...]

    Sea Glass

    By 26 Comments

    A few years ago my family purchased an antique apothecary jar. It's lovely, tall and delicate with a curving shape, the type of jar once used to store cotton balls or candy. We display it on a high shelf and fill it with beach glass. There are two beaches near us where locals go to hunt for glass. The first, closest to our house, is the best. It's rocky and not suitable for sun bathing, but walk there at low tide and you are likely to find fistfuls of sea glass, in colors ranging from brown to … [Read more...]

    How To Time Travel

    By

    Imagine this. You’re sitting at your desk, toiling away on your latest manuscript. It’s been a frustrating few hours (or days, or weeks, or years) and the words aren’t coming together the way you’d like. You decide to take a break just as the doorbell rings. It’s the mail carrier with a registered letter for you! You accept it, and then stare. The letter is addressed to you in your own handwriting, with the title "writer" in big bold letters before your name. And the postmark is from five years … [Read more...]

    My Superpower is Slacking Off

    By

    It’s summer where I am, and the days are hot and heavy. Condensation beads the sides of my glass of ice tea. The dog rests motionless in front of the fan and the lines of my WIP, which should be marching across the computer screen like ants across hot pavement, are still. It’s summer. The season of unlimited time and no time at all. I forget this every year. September to June I’m mired by the school calendar, my days shaped by carpools and sporting events, by ballet classes and dance … [Read more...]

    Biting the Bullet — Tracking my Writing Habit

    By

    I’m a writer. I’ve been a writer since I first held a pencil and figured out how to spell, both somewhere around the first grade. (I was a late bloomer.) Writing is as integral to my identity as my name or my face. Yet somehow this past year, I found myself not writing. Sure, I was talking about writing. I was reading about the craft of writing. I was thinking about writing all the time. But the words were not making it to the paper. To be fair, other important activities were being neglected … [Read more...]

    An Introvert Walks Into a Writing Group …

    By

    Talk of collaboration is in the air lately. At Writer Unboxed, we’re not only great at supporting our fellow writers, we’re good at working with them too! Author Heather Webb’s recent post on the positives and pitfalls of collaboration immediately made me think of another WUer — our own Jan O’Hara. Jan, a former family physician who hails from Canada, has turned collaboration into a fine art. Her first book was one in a series of interconnected novels that shared a physical world and even … [Read more...]

    Blow It Up

    By

    Sometimes in life everything goes your way. And sometimes in life, you need to blow stuff up. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. (Ignore the boxes of fireworks stockpiled in the corner for the Fourth of July.) Please don’t go buy explosives. Instead, think about what dramatic change in your writing life — in your writing relationships — would look like. And keep in mind that even metaphorical explosions can change your course. As a writer, I’m always looking for ways to be better. … [Read more...]

    Bee Still My Writing — Why and How I’m Taking Time Off

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    It’s been a hard year, writing-wise. A book I love isn’t being loved back by anyone in publishing at the moment. This book took more of my time and of my soul to finish than I’d like to admit, but in the publishing world, that’s never a guarantee of success. Another book that I’m revising has gotten ideas from witnessing the first book’s failure. This second book stomps its feet and sticks out its tongue as if it’s a sullen child. “I won’t!  I won’t do what you say!” it tells me every time I … [Read more...]

    Peanut Butter Plus Chocolate Equals Better Writing

    By

    When it comes to fiction writing, I am the original Poky Little Puppy. I tend to spend a long time thinking about my stories before I write them, scribbling a key line here, a paragraph there, then erasing them when they aren’t perfect and starting again. In other words, I take too damn long to finish the book. Some of my pokiness could originally be attributed to lifestyle: When I wrote my first book, I was a new mom and had little kids. I could barely carve out 15 seconds, let alone 15 … [Read more...]

    What to Read When You’re Not Reading Books

    By

    A few months ago I was making polite conversation, as one does,  with a parent at a sporting event where our children were attempting to thrash each other, as they do. It was cold and rainy and once we’d exhausted the topic of the weather, there wasn’t much to say.  Politics? We didn’t know each other, so best not to go there. Sports? Awkward, given the game in front of us. So I turned to my personal failsafe — reading.  “I don’t have time to read,” my new potential friend said.  And then saw … [Read more...]

    Let Your (Sub)conscious Be Your Guide

    By

    “I didn’t know what I was writing about until I’d finished the book.” Have you ever heard an author say that?  Have you ever said it yourself?  It’s happened to me more times than I can count. As authors, we can be blind to the themes in our own work.  I have a theory — often, what we’re writing about is influenced by what our subconscious is secretly grappling with.  If we can recognize those issues and themes, we can use them to deepen and strengthen our writing. First, let’s look at why we … [Read more...]