At my grandmother’s assisted-living center, residents line up their walkers in the hall when they go into the dining hall for a meal. When I went to visit this week, more than a dozen black roller-walkers were up against the wall, each personalized with nick-knacks hanging from the bars. I planned to take a day […]
I know what you’re thinking: It’s an oxymoron. Novels are fiction. But when it comes to narrative nonfiction, the genre of my book, labels aren’t that simple. My travel memoir tells a true story, but it’s meant to read like a novel. That means I’ve got to work elements of fiction into my book, including […]
I love deadlines: the thrill of them approaching, the accomplishment of meeting them and how they force me to get work done. I work well under pressure. I am a journalist, after all. But self-imposed deadlines are a bit trickier, mostly because I have to set them myself. Since I just started writing my book […]
If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you know what I’ve been working on for the last four months: outlining my book, writing a book proposal and query letter, choosing agents to approach, applying to writers’ colonies, learning about blog book tours, and then some. I’ve also, believe it or not, written some of the […]
If I can’t get into a writers’ colony, I figured, I’ll join a critique group. I found one pretty quickly in my area, through the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. And they met at my local library! How convenient. But when I showed up at a meeting for the first time, I felt slightly out of […]
Writing a travel memoir has been a dream of mine for years. Ever since I realized my love for travel, writing about it seemed like the perfect project, a chance to use my journalistic skills, write creatively and see the world, all at once. So even before leaving my job as a reporter with the […]