Maybe, just maybe, the inspirations for my WU posts are at times a little too on the nose. I mean, who would have thought that four years after a global pandemic, three years after an assault on the US Capitol, and mere weeks following the felony conviction of a former President, a subsequent assassination attempt on his life and the unprecedented departure of the sitting President from his reelection bid would prompt me to consider the unraveling of social order and how it is depicted in fiction?  Really, what are the chances? Yet here I am contemplating all of that, synthesizing it in ..read more

I’ve been in multiple book clubs, each with its own personality and reading preferences. I love book clubs for the discussions they foster and for the enthusiastic recommendations that members of those clubs make. As a result of my book clubs, I’ve read many books I would otherwise have skipped over or never even known about. Several of my book clubs over the years have included readers who qualify their book recommendations by listing and justifying any undesirable (by their definition) elements of the book: it has a lot of swearing, but the story is important. It includes one sex scene, but ..read more

“The moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow – as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper.” – Henry David Thoreau.[i] Thanks to my parents’ foresight, little-girl me took swimming and tumbling lessons. I had a canary yellow bike with streamers dangling from the handlebars that carried me up and down the half-mile road leading from our house at the end of a cul-de-sac to the highway, whereupon I spun around and pedaled like the wind in the other direction (No helmet? What? Nah. This was 1977!). But athletic ..read more

On my studio wall, scrawled in my own handwriting on a long Post-It is, “Art uses us to reproduce itself. Even bad art takes courage.” I’ve looked all morning to see who said this bit of wisdom, but I haven’t found a source. It might have been in a class or a meeting and someone was brilliant so I wrote it down. Attribution aside, think about those words. Art is using us—me and you—to reproduce itself, to multiply in the world, to spread itself into new cracks and crevices of despair or delusion or exhaustion. It needs us, our hands and heart and heads, to focus on bringing our little piece of ..read more

Today, it’s our honor to welcome longtime friend of WU Chris Blake today as our guest. Chris is a writer and editor with many years of daily newspaper reporting experience. After leaving the newspaper business in the 1990s, he served for 20 years as a senior manager for several trade and professional associations. He is currently an adjunct journalism professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT, and is the communications coordinator for the Connecticut Bankers Association. He has written an unpublished novel, A Prayer for Maura. Chris lives in Westerly, RI. Please read ..read more

FROM FREE EXPRESSIONS SEMINARS AND LITERARY SERVICES Join us for our *new* VIRTUAL BREAKOUT NOVEL INTENSIVE with literary agent Donald Maass October 29 – December 10, 2024 For more than twenty years, Donald Maass has partnered with Free Expressions Seminars to offer one of the industry’s most acclaimed writing workshops. Many of our students have gone on to find agent representation, publishing—even bestselling—success, and to have their works optioned (and produced) for film and television. This is a substantive, stimulating, and rewarding experience for writers who crave excellence and ..read more

While authors such as myself love attending book clubs for their own novels, the case for attending them goes beyond that.  Over the past year and a half, I have been a part of one book club. In addition, when I and a group of friends all started the same book series a new book club sprang up.  As an author, there is a definite difference between being a part of a book club and being the special guest of someone else’s book club. Below are some of my reasons why writers should be a part of a book club. Being forced to read outside your genre When you write in one specific genre it b ..read more

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 t ..read more

Please welcome multi-published author Randy Susan Meyers back to Writer Unboxed today! Randy is a critically acclaimed national bestselling author of five novels; The Massachusetts Council of the Book has selected three of them as Must Read Books. Her novels explore domestic drama, societal issues and cultural nuances, informed by her years working with troubled youth, community, and government agencies; working with criminals and their families as a director of a Batterer Intervention Program; and a decade of working as a director of Boston’s Community Centers. She teaches at the Grub Street ..read more

Like a first impression when we meet someone new, a book’s title is (usually) the first and most enduring thing we know about a book. That’s true whether we learn about the book via word-of-mouth, an online ad, a social media post, or a display in a bookstore. The title alone can make us want to read a book, especially if it’s not by an “auto-buy” author. It can serve as a kind of shorthand, especially if it includes familiar words—for instance, in women’s fiction, words like more, know, all, never, once, secret, time, every, and always—which signal that this book will be like other books tha ..read more