Writers! Are you working on a YA or middle-grade novel and want some feedback and assistance polishing it up to submit to agencies and publishers? Well, maybe I can help. I wanted to post quickly here to say that my eight-week online YA Novel Writing: Master Class with Mediabistro starts next week! I don’t want … Continue reading »
I’ve been teaching an online YA Novel Writing: Master Class with Mediabistro this winter, and I can’t even tell you how much I’ve been enjoying it. I love being a part of helping other writers polish their novels and write ahead to complete their drafts—and reading the pages every week, sometimes as they write, has … Continue reading »
So my presentation with Kelly Jensen of STACKED at the Kidlitosphere Conference was this weekend and—spoiler—I think it went well! For those of you who don’t know, the Kidlitosphere Conference, aka KidLitCon, is a yearly conference for bloggers in young adult and children’s lit, and this year it was held in New York City, at … Continue reading »
If you missed any of the debut interviews this week, be sure to check them out: What Happens Next and Colleen Clayton: “There is nothing like holding a book in your hands with your name on the front of it. . . . I would run my finger down the spines and think: Wow. I did it. … Continue reading »
I’ve been feeling nostalgic all week as these Fall 2012 debut author interviews have been going up… Being a debut author is such an exhilarating, beautiful, promising—and even terrifying—time. There is no way to foresee or calculate what will happen or how you’ll feel about being published and out in the world. And once the … Continue reading »
What’s Periwinkle Blue Here we are in the last days of August. The sky above my rickety fire escape is periwinkle blue and completely cloudless, and the wail of sirens is fading away down in the street until there’s that strange kind of silence you find sometimes in Manhattan, punctuated by the buzz of air-conditioners … Continue reading »
I’m spending the month of August in limbo. Part of this is due to my Macbook breaking, which kind of derailed my plan to spend all of August offline at a café writing retreat of my own making, but I will restrain myself from complaining about that here. (And also, as of yesterday, E fixed it … Continue reading »
I’m immersing myself in some serious work on the novel this weekend, but I had to stop for a moment and share this story with you. Yesterday I went to go pick up a package at Penguin, the publisher of Imaginary Girls and my upcoming novel 17 & Gone. I live within walking distance to the … Continue reading »
For the longest time after grad school, maybe in reaction to being workshopped so much I could hear twelve different responses to every line I put down on the page, I crawled into myself and stopped showing my writing to very many people. Friends would have to beg to read it, and even then, once … Continue reading »
The title of this post? I said those exact words yesterday. I’m a few days from finishing this round of revision and turning it in. I’m a mess. I’m trying so hard. I have no perspective anymore. I’m forcing myself to work at a pace that’s unnatural to me—in my natural state, it would take … Continue reading »
