Written by couns22cNovember 30, 2021

Writing as a form of dialogue with mythological traditions: What is white culture anyway?

This month, I read Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time, a middle grade novel about an Indian preteen who has to come into her power as a “soul-daughter” of a Hindu god of the heavens in order to stop an ancient, world-destroying evil that she, herself, accidentally summoned. The book is good. The book is good in a way that makes me screw up my eyes and puff out my cheeks and become a red-faced jealousy goblin. And so…

Written by couns22cAugust 26, 2021August 26, 2021

Lonesome road: How to establish support networks when you’re new to writing

Writing is, in particular, a difficult art form. Unlike physical arts such as drawing, painting, or crochet, you cannot just flash your product (draft or finished) in front of just any bystander’s face and hope for external validation. I know this from experience…

Written by couns22cJune 7, 2021June 7, 2021

Compelling openings一now with examples!

So I’m currently reading River Quest. It’s a chapter book from the Dinotopia universe and WOW does it jump on the plot horse…

Written by couns22cJanuary 9, 2021February 12, 2022

Description is a thing one should know how to do…

Hello gentle readers! Happy 2021! Thank goodness 2020 is over. Maybe now we can get back to being moved by minor ecological destruction like all of Australia burning down. Ha. Ha. 😦 I was having a good think about what I should write my next newsletter about. Boyfriend suggested the connection of how plot drives […]

Written by couns22cDecember 13, 2020June 7, 2021

What I wish I’d known about querying agents: and what I wish agents knew about querying

Hello gentle reader. It is I—Chelsea Counsell. Long time no talk. I, like you, have been trying to survive during corona, which generally means dragging myself out of bed like a rotting mollusk and continuing to labor under the yoke of capitalism even though I feel… like a rotting mollusk. In November, I began actually […]

Written by couns22cSeptember 11, 2020June 7, 2021

Real on the page is not real in the world

When I wrote my post on making decisions, I described how a writer must decide things about the characters, plot, and world of their book rather than leaving them up in the air. It’s important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in order to compare that blueprint against the understanding your beta readers receive. […]

Written by couns22cJuly 27, 2020June 7, 2021

The hardest thing I ever learned was to be decisive…

In the last fifteen years, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you have to make decisions while writing. Setting a character’s motives, scars, and hobbies in stone can feel confining because, what if you decide you don’t like what you picked and then you have to change them? WORK, UGH. But […]

Written by couns22cJuly 24, 2020July 24, 2020

I love writing because…

Everyone I know who is a writer seems to think writing is really hard. And maybe parts of it are. You basically are building a simulacrum of the world, filtering signal from the noise so that your storytelling focuses on specific things that create the idea of a story or the idea of a world, […]

Written by couns22cJune 14, 2020June 14, 2020

Exciting Books I Dream of Reading

It’s 2020 and I am 28. I don’t know what exactly happened, but I’ve gotten much better at narrowing down the type of books I want to read. Spoiler: they involve animals and girl power. When I was a teenager, I had a collection of like 800+ unread books stacked all over my room that […]