“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.” Most of us have heard this saying before, but until we experience it for ourselves, we don’t truly understand what it means. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had my own experiences with giving in to the…
The Cost of NOT Editing
Self-publishing can be a cost-effective way to get your work out into the world. Setting up a title on CreateSpace and then selling it both digitally and in hard copy through Amazon is free. The allure of publishing without jumping through the difficult hoops of query letters and book proposals and agents is…
The Cost of Editing
This afternoon, I received an invitation to submit a proposal for a job posted on Elance, one of the freelancer sites where I sometimes bid for editorial work. Here’s the job description: I have a 35,000 word eBook that needs to be proofread for grammatical errors, spelling errors, edited and copy edited…
And Now for Something Completely Different
I have spent the last seven years in the composition classroom pouring my time, my energy, and my self into my students’ writing. I have sat through countless hours of committee meetings, faculty meetings, division meetings, task force meetings, curriculum meetings. I have trained dozens of writing tutors, advised hundreds…
Some Whining
“You have to write every day. You just have to. If you aren’t always thinking about your story, you’re not getting anywhere. If you get away from the thing you’re working on, it takes a long time to settle back into the immersion.” –Chad Harbach while speaking at Lakeland College…
A Plot Is Not Enough
I’m re-reading Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story for my writing group. I’ve only made it to page 26 so far, but already I’m reminded of why this book is so highly regarded in creative nonfiction circles. It’s because Gornick is able to explain what essayists do in a way that…
Crappy Endings
As an editor, there are few things that I hate more than reading fifteen pages of an excellent story or essay, only to have the writer blow it in the last page or two with an unsatisfying (or downright awful) ending. I wish I could say this was a rare…
The Fallibility of Memory
I was reading Poets & Writers last night and was surprised (and happy) to see Anna Keesey featured in an article highlighting the best debut novels of 2012. I met her eight or nine years ago, when she was a guest in my undergraduate nonfiction workshop. She was tall and blond…
Post-AWP Blues
This year was my first AWP. I was prepared for the information overload, for the crowded elevators, for the snobbishness, for the holy-shit-that’s-Jane-Smiley feeling, for the casual run-ins with grad school classmates, for the awkward conversations with strangers, for the temptation to spend too much money at the book fair.…
Send Shit Out Night
I have been submitting my work to literary journals since 2003 (although only recently have they begun to publish me; the photo at right depicts my stack of rejection letters next to the seventh Harry Potter book, for scale, and these are only the hard copy rejections — there are plenty more…