With the COVID-19 pandemic raging and all the accompanying uncertainty about our future post-climate change, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a writer on a rapidly changing planet. What’s our responsibility in a time like this? What kind of stories do we need right now? Is it even possible—or desirable—for …
Hear me out on this one. There’s a lot of advice out there (I’ve given it myself) about being okay with writing a shitty first draft, and I basically agree with the premise. Too many new writers get paralyzed with the expectation that they should be able to sit down and barf out a flawless …
Here’s a little story. When I wrote Pigtail Girls back in 2017, I put the novelette through an exhaustive beta reading and developmental editing process that involved soliciting, reading, and organizing the helpful opinions of over 30 writers, readers, and editors. Prior to that, I’d been swapping stories with other writers, workshopping my fiction, and …
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