The Author Life

4th grade/dreams/Aerosmith/wisdom…what came out of the idea box.

The Literary Club of Andalusia High School joined creative writers from Foley Middle School for a workshop on writer’s craft and a roundtable discussion about pursuing the dream of becoming a writer.

If you wanna fiddle with writing, you gotta have a “pen” in your hand. It takes a lot of hours, determination, and brain sweat to coax a ream’s worth of words into coherence; that’s why it’s a craft.

Ride shotgun on my adventure to the Atlantic for the Amelia Island Book Festival.!

I did not discover Joseph Campbell and his phenomenal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces until my mid-forties. I credit Campbell with lighting the fire under my butt to write my own stories.

If you want to know how it sounds, you’ve got to read your stuff out loud. Reading your work in front of a live audience can be nerve-wracking, but absolutely nothing helps you understand syntax, inflection, and pacing better than oral reading.

One of the biggest challenges for writers, particularly writers of fiction, is to lend life to the characters they create.  Here are a few things to think about as you’re clicking away at your NANOWRIMO goal or having your go at the Great American Novel.

If you want to be down with writing, you’ve got to write it down. Today, I’m going to share with you my process for drafting a manuscript.  In other words, what  I DO to get that story out of my head and into a form that will one day become a book! 

Just a smalltown girl, hanging in a bestseller’s world. She took the midday plane to Or-Lan-Do.

Rocky met with the lively ladies of Book Chat on a shaded veranda overlooking Mobile Bay to talk about A Gathering Misery. As ice-cold drinks were served, the interactive discussion revolved around the creative process and the use of family heirlooms as scaffolding for both plot development and character arcs in Southern Literature.

#layofflaura may not be a movement, but it IS a protest.

From a fall comes philosophy

Lifestyles of the published and a teensy bit famous

Ah, middle school. Most of us want to forget it. Seriously, you should go back!

A particularly gruesome death befell me last night. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” I’m not much of a poet, but the same applies for your friendly neighborhood horror writer: no fear in the writer, no fear in the reader.

Graduate-level writing instruction fired my imagination, while real-life actual intellectual discussion about the craft of writing…discussion with egos, politics, and the minutiae of daily responsibilities held in suspense for just a few days amongst a community of authors–this is the stuff new years are made of!