Pies made Karen's stories a household name I once heard that writing is like a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie. Long ago, Karen Stolz was a mentor to me in the earliest days of my fiction career. She evaluated my submission pieces for my unsuccessful application to Texas State’s MFA program, […]

You've got to read novels in order to write yours The tomatoes in my back yard didn’t need to see other tomatoes to grow. They started from seed, after all. So what good does it do to find something to emulate, while growing? The tomatoes are now small and ripening. Success is at hand. But […]

It's time to have a genteel discussion about pricing, especially as established by small presses. Too few of them seem to recognize that buying a book is a price-sensitive transaction. I would not want to be the author trying to sell my book on my limited platform for 30 percent more than a bestseller's novel. […]

The challenge we all face when we approach the task of book discovery is making things unique and specific—at the same time that we keep the desires and problems universal. "A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York." That broke Irish woman plus a standup comedian (a situation […]

While we structure our stories, we follow advice. Some advice is from agents, some of whom are not ready to let go of old rules. These can be rules like “Never start a book with a prologue.” Or the advice to make a big problem appear on the first page, or even making sure the […]