I've often said writing a novel is like running a marathon, but I'm beginning to think it's more like making a jigsaw puzzle: The charge of the first draft is to get the pieces all laid out on the table, face-up, so you can see what's there. The trick of subsequent drafts is to get them all fitted together into a picture…

            When I first began to work on IF I BRING YOU ROSES, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of my ambition.  I recall how I stood in the middle of my office surrounded by all the books that I loved. How could I ever hope to achieve what Anton Chekhov, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald had? I was a mere mortal.  I couldn’t think of how to start so I prayed—for guidance to research and learn all that I needed to know to tell my story and—for the talent to…

Jill Bryant is a freelance writer and editor who also writes nonfiction books for children and book reviews for Quill & Quire. She is the author of Dazzling Women Designers, Backyard Circus, Making Shadow Puppets, Amazing Women Athletes, and many others. She freelances for Scholastic, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, and several other publishers. Visit her site at http://jillbryant.ca/…

She Writer Sandra Beasley writes about the publication of her first memoir on Meg Waite Clayton's 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started today

I'm delighted to be hosting Sandra Beasley on 1st Books today. The Boston Globe calls Sandra's…

Here is what you might have missed around She Writes this past week

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The rise of the Internet has resulted in the rise of self-publishing. We frequently discuss this phenomenon on She Writes, covering everything from the navigation of its pitfalls to the diminishing lists of the big publishing houses. What we forget, however, is that there are levels of self-publishing. There are platforms like iUniverse and Lulu, which give you a finished hard copy…

A great advantage of blogging about book publicity is that I get to ask booksellers questions from a vantage point other than that of desperate author. 

Jenn Northington has the kind of job that book nerds everywhere find glamorous.  She is the events manager at WORD, a truly wonderful indie bookstore in Brooklyn.  (Motto: EAT SLEEP READ)  Author readings, signings and…

As I have been blogging about very loudly lately (can one blog loudly?), I am trying to get back into the swing of writing after years away from the daily habit of doing the work.  As some of you know, I don't feel, when I've written a blogpost, that I've…

Countdown to Publication—Week Two

             Eighteen years ago, six weeks after giving birth to my son, a friend and I took the train to downtown Chicago to meet Oscar Hijuelos on his book tour for THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE.   I was so excited…

Here is what you might have missed around She Writes this past week

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Amidst Murdoch’s excesses, Sarah Glazer finds restrictions on journalists more worrying

One of the joys of moving to London 5 years ago was my morning perusal of the local newsstand. As I read the…

It was so wonderful to read all of your wishes in response to my birthday post for She Writes, where I shared my hopes for the my upcoming writing year.  I especially appreciated the encouragement and support you offered me and one another (and loved your idea, @RYCJ, of checking in with ten of the other…

We don’t know what your plans are for tonight, but Isabel and I (the two She Writes interns) have had the tickets booked for a month- we’re both going to say goodbye to Harry Potter, and more symbolically, to the period in our lives in which we can still read children’s fiction as children. Okay, so that time has probably passed for both of us; but we’re willing to extend the fantasy a little longer and savor this final glimmer of childhood.

Despite our enthusiasm, we aren’t…

Countdown to Publication: Week Three

            We took my mother to visit her sister in Bangor, Michigan this past weekend and we were talking about the old days at the kitchen table when my mother mentioned how years ago when she visited Spain, she had…

Rosy Thornton is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her academic interests include landlord and tenant and housing law, real property and trusts, as well as feminist approaches to law; she has written and published in those fields. She has also published four novels: More Than Love Letters (2007), Hearts and Minds (2008), Crossed Wires (2009) and The Tapestry of Love (2010).…

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I wasn’t planning on spending a day and a half turning around an op-ed. But when editors from certain venues call, I jump. Some opportunities are just too good to turn down.

Colleagues—especially, often, academics, and especially, often, fellow writing mamas—sometimes ask me how it’s possible to turn something around with the speed that today’s media requires when you've got so much ELSE, er, going on. So I thought I’d break it down, blow by blow, in an effort to…