12 Inspiring Prompts for Writers: Day 5
Who are authors (or artists) whose work you admire? What skills do they highlight? What is it that they do that you find so impressive? What can you…
Tag: middle grade fiction
12 Inspiring Prompts for Writers: Day 1
With twelve prompts over the next few days, I will guide you through simple reflections to inspire you and encourage stronger writing efforts in 2025.
Characters that leap off the page: Using interiority to show your characters’ inner world
Have you ever heard the phrase, “I want a book where the characters leap right off the page?” If you’ve ever queried before or researched agents, I’m sure you have. After all, isn’t that what everyone wants in a book?
It can be so frustrating to read an abstract goalpost like “give me a character that leaps off the page,” because obviously you, yourself, feel like your character does that, but how do you know….
12 Cozy Fantasy Books to Get You Through the Long Dark Winter
In the last few years, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with finding fantasy books that make me feel warm, happy, and safe–like a hug from a good friend. I think I’ve always been the sort of person who wants fiction to tie up in a nice little bow, where all the threads are resolved, where everyone gets a HEA (happily ever after) or a HFN (happily for now), and where nothing particularly bad happens…
Year in Review – 2022
Hello everyone! Where we last left off following the adventures of Chelsea Counsell, American Wizard, we found her vomiting and feeling sorry for herself… So what happened in the rest of 2022?
Showing vs. telling: When is it appropriate to tell rather than show?
In writing, “show, don’t tell” is a frequently touted maxim, probably because the CIA pushed it into prestigious writing communities like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Paris Review, and they, in turn, spread it as an unbreakable literary law. But unless you only want…
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…
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 […]
