Writer Unboxed - The "Connect Kitty" Approves
AAC can't help but deliver the best bloggish content that will inspire writers to new leaps of imagination. This one is mostly new releases, bestsellers, literary fiction historical fiction, mysteries, popular non-fiction, memoirs and biographies.
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While we all want to stay on top of what’s current about craft, be alerted to the latest conferences, and connect with fellow writers on social media, staying informed about the business side of writing and publishing is some (or many) might say, a necessary evil. To save you from spending hours scrolling through websites to find insights into the business side of writing, we’ve curated a list of recent posts for you to dig into or peruse at your leisure. We hope you’ll find value in these and share the links with anyone else who might want to keep up with the latest. Well, 2023 has started off with a publishing bang. Lots of news, everything from AI’s increasing presenc…
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During my prolific writing days, and even during my not prolific writing days, when I’d hear the term “writer’s block,” I believed it to be a self-indulgent myth. Either you were writing or you were not. You sit your ass in your chair and you write or you get up from your chair and decide you will not write. I could give you a lot of reasons, excuses, lamentations for why I haven’t completed my next novel. I bet some of you know a lot of these reasons, excuses, lamentations, too, and likely 89.999% of them are valid. We can talk about how others may say that giving up writing for any length of time is for those who really aren’t dedicated to the craft, but that’s bull-ta…
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Rachel Toalson is an especially prolific poet, essayist, and award-winning author of picture books and of middle grade and young adult fiction. Lest you think writing books for young humans means toning down reality, Rachel has mastered the art of hard topics — how to convey them, how to guide a young mind through them — in a way that helps to instill hope and to set young people on a path of functional thinking. “Toalson handles difficult, complex subjects with nuance and care, never losing sight of who her readers are, and striking the delicate balance between honesty and hope.” —Jordan Leigh Zwick, The Book Seller (Grass Valley, CA) Her next work of middle grade fic…
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Here’s what I Iike the least about superhero movies: In order for the hero to be affirmed as heroic, and for justice to prevail and the plot to resolve, in the end there must be a fight. Not just any fight, mind you, but a gigantic, loud and massively destructive battle. You’re not truly a hero until you prove it, not with weapons but with your fists. (Or perhaps energy bolts shooting from your upraised palms.) That’s what a hero is. Violent. A fighter. Same goes for female superheroes. Is that what it takes to elevate a mere protagonist or main character to the level of hero? Is that what makes heroes super? No fists, no hero? I’ve posted in this space before …
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If writing ever makes you feel lonely, consider Cecile Pineda’s work. You won’t find solace there. You will find a model of courage, of an artist living “at the edge of Being,” the phrase she uses in a 2004 interview with Jeff Biggers in The Bloomsbury Review. Pineda never offers readers the comfort of genre, of managed expectations. She never feigns a coherent, well-organized world or self. For her, the world is mutilated and nonsensical, and the self is shattered. She writes as she lives, balancing between life and death, always a soldier at the tip of the spear, never a general safe at the back of a fray. Didion could point to a center that wasn’t holding. Pineda would…
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My wife and I recently found ourselves in a bit of a predicament. Our seemingly simple mission was to sync the buttons in a new car to our garage door opener. She sat in the car just outside, reading and calling out the instructions, while I got on a mini-stepladder to access the opener’s motor unit, hanging over the car bay. The operation had to be performed in a sequence, with some precise timing. Our first problem: I didn’t have any glasses on or with me. Next, due to my sketchy hearing, I kept mishearing her instructions (alas, it seems my lifelong love of well-amplified music has caught up with me). After about five failed attempts we agreed on a new tactic. Once she…
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Musicians in The Cobblestone, Dublin, Ireland by Giuseppe Milo Recently I had the good fortune to listen to traditional live music at a bar in Dublin, Ireland. The fiddlers were in fine form and the whole bar was tapping along to the beat, myself included, although I didn’t recognize a single song being played. But then the leader of the band struck up a tune I was sure I knew, even though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. And suddenly and all at once, the way illumination often strikes, it came into focus — the band was playing Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah. Positive I was going crazy, I glanced around for confirmation. The older gentleman next to me…
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It’s been a while since I’ve shared thoughts here, my dear Unboxers. I took a sabbatical last year for a chance to catch up on a deadline that I was horribly behind on after covid and a major family emergency. Ironically, the time off allowed me to enjoy so many more of your posts. You really are a brilliant bunch of writers. There are as many thought-provoking comments as there are posts. This community is so special and I feel lucky to be among you. But I digress. All is well here now. It’s well…except for January. January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a …
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Please welcome guest author Emilie-Noelle Provost to Writer Unboxed today! Emilie-Noelle is an accomplished editor and writer, having held editorial positions with four magazines and written hundreds of articles over the years. She has a published book of middle-grade fiction, The Blue Bottle, and her first novel of adult fiction, The River is Everywhere–about a 16-year-old who must overcome doubt after his best friend’s shattering death–will release on March 14th. “Provost’s writing is vivid, and her pace is swift. Readers of all ages will be drawn to this moving coming-of-age tale.” – Paul Marion, editor of Atop an Underwood, the early work of Jack Kerouac “Ernest Be…
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Please welcome bestselling Jamie Beck to Writer Unboxed today! Recently, Jamie asked the opinion of other writers about trigger warnings on novels, and such a robust conversation evolved that it seemed obvious: This would make a great topic to explore on WU. Happily, Jamie agreed to write the piece. From her bio: Jamie Beck is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of 18 novels, many of which have been translated into multiple languages and have collectively sold more than three million copies worldwide. Critics at Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist have respectively called her work “smart,” “uplifting,” and “entertaining.” In addit…
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Please welcome author and book coach Mary McDonough to Writer Unboxed today! If the name Mary McDonough sounds familiar, it may be because she portrayed Erin on The Waltons for a decade. Mary chronicles her Walton family and life beyond the mountain in Lessons from the Mountain, What I Learned from Erin Walton. Her debut novel, One Year, was published in 2014, followed by a second novel, Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane, which was made into a Hallmark movie. “A warm, heartfelt novel about what it means to belong to a family. You won’t want to put it down.” –Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of A Lowcountry Wedding Perhaps the result of the many years sh…
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Therese here. Today marks Writer Unboxed’s seventeenth year. Wow. I think that means WU is off to college soon. In other news, I just popped a new gray hair. A wee bit of history: Writer Unboxed was founded in 2006 by Kathleen Bolton and me. This was the same year Twitter was founded and Facebook opened its doors to the public. On the one hand, we’ve obviously not experienced the same meteoric rise in success as those social media giants. On the other hand, we’ve never been accused of using our vast influence to try to sway an election or snuff out our competitors, so overall I think we’re doing pretty well for ourselves. (Wink.) We have over 10k feed readers, and over…
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The dreaded synopsis. Let’s be honest, we’ve all complained about writing it. And why not, when compressing a 100k-word novel into three short paragraphs can feel harder than a quantum physics exam? When I wrote my first book, I nearly cried when it came to writing the synopsis. It felt awful, trying to get every ounce of my plot into a snack-sized page–at least until I spoke with another author in passing about synopses. She spoke about them with so much love, and said they were one of her favorite things to write. In fact, she said writing the synopsis was the first thing she did, even before laying down the details of her plot. Her offhanded comment hit me in the gut…
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Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Here’s the question: Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents. So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 …
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Welcome to a new edition of Desmond’s Drops! This month, enjoy three drops focused on one topic–pacing–each packed with great examples. Pacing Montage Compression Email subscribers, please click directly to writerunboxed.com to view, or visit all of Demond’s Drops on YouTube. Look for more of Desmond’s Drops in March! Have your own bit of wisdom to share? Drop it in comments. [url={url}]View the full article[/url]
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One of the more famous prologues, courtesy of Star Wars. I’m all for retiring outdated storytelling techniques. I don’t miss the puzzle mysteries of the teens and twenties, where the characters were little more than props in complicated, contrived, often implausible mysteries. Second person narration died with Bright Lights, Big City, and that’s fine. And, naturally, a lot fewer people are writing epistolary novels now that a lot fewer people are writing epistles. But it’s too soon to give up on prologues, as a recent client wanted to do. He had a storytelling situation – a bit of critical action that took place well before the main story started – that cried out fo…
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If you’re in a non-writing phase and frustrated, several recent Writer Unboxed posts might speak to your lack of production. They address the seasonal nature of writing careers, the need to respect creative limitations, and how to cope when life gets in the way. This is all well and good. I support this advice one hundred percent. But what if, as per Kelsey Allagood’s recent post, some part of you knows fatigue and overwhelm aren’t your issue? What if somehow, despite a calendar that could be cleared and an express desire to write, your efforts can best be described as lackluster? What if encouragement doesn’t help but only deepens your shame and guilt? Part of you kno…
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In the never-ending quest for snappy repartee in our fiction, we often overlook the ways in which our own personal exchanges with friends and family members provide us with creative language we can use (i.e., steal) for our stories. Using idioms to freshen up dialogue is hardly a revolutionary idea. But many idioms have become so commonly and widely used they amount to clichés: Look what the cat dragged in. Better get cracking. Gotta keep the wolf from the door. [If you’re looking for a source for such expressions, trite and not so trite, check out this idiom dictionary.] The problem with some of our personal sayings is that they are so dependent on a unique context con…
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan A story launches when something happens to a character that lands him in a troubling predicament. Life as he knew it can no longer continue on in the same way. He needs to do something, and his progress toward his goal will be defined by a desire he hopes to achieve. But lurking beneath his hopeful journey is the threat of engaging with circumstances he hopes to avoid. Those circumstances are what we call stakes. Like electrified wires that guard the edges of your protagonist’s path—and which, after he passes, seem to grow closer to each other and strengthen behind him—the stakes for failure drive the protagonist ever forward. Why are such …
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Greetings for the New Year, all! In 2023 I’m presenting a new series for WU, exploring how walking ancient pathways, physical or metaphorical, can strengthen writers in an age when humankind sometimes seems bent on destroying not only itself, but also the precious and beautiful natural world of which we are a part. I’ll build the series around the philosophies that guide me in life and in artistic practice. These owe a significant amount to my membership of a druid order, OBOD. But I am no spiritual leader. I’m an ordinary woman, I’m a writer, and I’m on a journey. The way is sometimes steep and stony, taking a toll on the bravest traveller. And it’s sometimes broad and s…
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Everyone wants their writing to be successful in some way, but what is a successful novel? That starts with your definition of success. If you measure success by the amount of books you finally sell, then you’re probably setting yourself up for some disappointment. Exact figures are hard to come by and are complicated by whether you count ebooks and audiobooks along with print books. It’s estimated that 15% of new books published by the top 10 publishers in the US will sell fewer than 12 copies in a year; only 0.04% will sell more than 100,000. It’s generally considered that a book needs to sell 5,000 copies to break even; 85% of books don’t achieve that.* Reports sugg…
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Happy New Year, WU Community, and prepare yourselves for another journey through the metaphors for writing I find through living my life. During the early days of COVID quarantine, it seems we all picked up at least one Weird Hobby. Weird Hobbies could include, but were not limited to: sourdough breadmaking, flower pressing, making origami cranes, needlepoint, cross stitching, basket weaving, making dollhouse miniatures, paper quilling, historical sewing, bookbinding, playing the keytar, becoming extremely good at niche board games, kombucha brewing, and so on. While I did find my perfect no-knead bread recipe, I also started watching Alexis Nikole Nelson, known as The …
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Therese here to introduce you to our new monthly columnist, Densie Webb! Densie had been working as a vital part of WU’s Twitter team for quite some time, gathering links to share there on the business of fiction. She’ll now bring that valuable knowledge to WU-blog — sharing some of the best, most pertinent links on the business here every month in Getting Down to Business. Please join me in welcoming her to this important beat for us all. Welcome, Densie, and thank you! While we all want to stay on top of what’s current about craft, be alerted to the latest conferences, and connect with fellow writers on social media, staying informed about the business side of writing…
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Therese here to introduce you to today’s guest, Terah Shelton Harris. I met Terah on Twitter, where I learned that she is a librarian and freelance writer–with works appearing in Catapult, Women’s Health, Every Day with Rachel Ray, and more–and that she had tackled a very difficult topic for her debut novel, One Summer in Savannah. I’m so pleased that she accepted the invitation to write for WU to share her experience–why she traveled the road she did, how it stretched her as a writer, and how her topic asked her to consider her readers. “Terah Shelton Harris’s daring debut is nothing short of astonishing. To write a novel that has the capacity to uplift you while it tea…
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In August 2021, my husband and I hugged our son goodbye and left him at a small college in Ohio, 2033 miles away from our home in Seattle. Minutes before the drop-off, my husband realized he had never shown our late blooming son how to shave with a good, old fashioned razor. And as we flew back to Seattle, I panic-realized that I had never taught him how to manage a high fever. How to wrap a scarf to prevent frostbite. How to buy used textbooks. How to shop for groceries. How to get the best price on groceries. How to cook the groceries in a dorm-size microwave. How to date. How to weather a broken heart. I had dropped my boy in the middle of Ohio with nary a survival…
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