When your friends start to leave the nest and send out queries, sign contracts, and talk to publishers – or commission their cover, finish up formatting, and prep to self-publish – it gets pretty gosh darn exciting. Everyone’s on alert, waiting for the next tidbit of publishing news. Their dreams are all becoming real! Highs and lows come hand in hand with the publishing journey. Sometimes a high can be just as stressful as a low – like when a friend of mine was caught between two amazing publishers in a bidding war. Though it’s an awesome problem to have,...
Back in 2014, I finished my MA in Writing for Young People. Workshops were a vital part of the coursework, my love for them grew exponentially. We officially stopped workshopping for class in May of that year. But unofficially? We never actually stopped. Sure, people pop in and out of the group as schedules change, and we’ve added another writer in the meantime. But a year and a half after our workshops “ended,” most of us meet every other week to critique each other’s pieces, even though we’re now split across three different time zones. How do we do it?...
Do you have a writer friend? Have you ever tried to write a joint story, or ever wanted to? Over the past four months, my friend Anneka Freeman and I have been cranking out a first draft for a dual project (mostly just for fun, but we’ll see). Keeping separate copies of the story on separate hard drives can get messy, so we opted to use Google Docs (even though we are both avid Scrivener fans). Below are some of our tips for how to use Google Docs to the max! Make a System The most important principle to any...
Among other things, my family has given me the Hoarder Gene. Thus whenever I am traveling, I collect scraps (tickets, maps, miscellany) to store away forever. After I studied abroad in 2012, I wound up with a whole box of various bits and pieces, and little idea what to do with them. In spring of 2014, as I neared the last six months of my time in Bath, England, I happened upon a charming photo album on sale at Paperchase. In retrospect, I think it’s actually meant to be a wedding album, but at the time I had two thoughts:...
So one or two things have happened in the last few weeks. And by one or few things, I mean a whole ton of stuff. At the beginning of October, my parents came to England for a series of fun adventures. We drove around because my dad considers it a personal challenge to take on as many foreign roads as possible. Bookstores were visited and historic sites toured. Our trip included high tea with my dad, which was something a little like trying to have high tea with Ron Swanson. At the end of October, my parents helped me pack up...
This is a general update blog post, so it’s going to be a bit random and short. Yay? My friend Katherine came for a visit! We had many adventures, including but not limited to: Catching a train only because the staff held their car door open for us, performing period dances on the lawn at Chatsworth (Pemberley), exploring a plague village, and a bit of waltzing in the Assembly Rooms! (Katherine is my dance buddy and we took full advantage of this.) I have been editing like a mad person. This will probably result in some revision-themed posts soon. I...
(Originally written on June 12th.) If you don’t know what Claridge’s is, that’s cool—I didn’t either a few weeks ago. But turns out it’s a super fancy hotel in London. When one of my mom’s friends had a conference coming, she invited me to stay with her. I said yes, but I didn’t know what I was getting into! A man in a top hat and uniform stepped up to the cab to let us out. A bellhop took our luggage. We pushed through the spinny door (love me some spinny doors) and entered a huge, gorgeous room filled with...
Last fall, I wrote an essay that eventually won third place in the Elie Wiesel Foundation’s Prize in Ethics. Over a year after the first draft, I found myself in New York City to attend seminars with the other winners and an award ceremony. It was a crazy, crazy experience, guys. October 2nd: I arrived from Heathrow and met my parents on Wednesday. We got to the Wellington Hotel (where the foundation had reserved a room for me) without too much hassle—though Dad driving in NYC during rush hour traffic was a terrifying experience in and of itself. I got...
