As a freelance editor, one of the main problems my writers face is the ideal of perfection. I struggle with this myself as a writer. If my project isn’t complete, it feels utterly imperfect, and that creates a mental block. I can’t write.
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Or else, I look at the work of other writers and think: They wrote this perfect thing. I’ll never be good enough to compete with them.

Putting aside the idea that writing is a competition (News Flash: It’s not.), I think this is a perfectly natural desire — the desire to be perfect. After all, as humans, we are always striving toward something in our lives. Writers are a special type of human in that we are striving towards creating — and we have high levels of perfectionism because we care about our work!

Read the full article on Medium . . .

Right now, I think we’re all struggling to get by as writers. When I poll my writer friends on their current writing life, everyone says that it’s a struggle to get words on paper. So keeping a journal ABOUT your writing might feel counter-intuitive. How can I write about my writing when I’m not getting much writing done?

Read the full article at Write Weird . . .

Fencon
September 17-19, Dallas, TX
Panels TBA
I'll be hosting a table at this con for Interstellar Flight Press! Come say Hi! 

Armadillocon 
October 15-17, 2021, Austin, TX 
Panels TBA 
I'll be hosting a table at this con for Interstellar Flight Press! Come say Hi! ​

As a freelance editor, many of my clients are respected business leaders and community civic leaders. I’ve seen how they’ve taught themselves to succinctly summarize an idea — boiling it down to its essence so that it’s easy to understand. The most successful leaders use writing as one of many tools to succeed and focus their thoughts.
Business owners and leaders already spend a lot of time writing. From emails to orders to proposals — professional writing skills are essential. You may notice that the most successful leaders are often articulate, quick-witted, and shrewd communicators.
Read the full article here . . .

Poets who have been writing for several years end up with lots of unfinished drafts and notes. As a freelance editor, I often work with clients who have tons of old drafts and no clue how to process them. For myself, I often write 100+ poems in a year, resulting in a massive amount of poem clutter.

After all, you don’t want to abandon those poems that are older, because they feel like your babies. But it is necessary to sort through them, to choose poems for publication or to just decide how to categorize them. As Paul Valery said, “No poem is ever ended, every poem is merely abandoned.” Poems that don’t work now might work later. Poems that aren’t published in a journal or magazine might make it into the later draft of a book.

As I was thinking about this process, I wished there was a good method for sorting through old drafts. Then I remembered one of my favorite Netflix shows and a woman named Marie Kondo.

Read the full article here . . .

“The writing of poetry is not a craft. We are making birds, not birdcages” –p.47, Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness

Revision is one of my least favorite things to do as a writer of fiction, but when it comes to poetry, I absolutely love it. As an editor, I work with many poets who are struggling to understand what a poem is and how they can improve their poetry. They see other poets succeeding (getting poetry acceptances, writing full-length collections, etc.) and want to know how to be a better writer of poetry.
In her MasterClass, Margaret Atwood says, “Revision means re-vision — you’re seeing it anew, and quite frequently when you’re doing that, you see possibilities that you didn’t see before and that light up parts of the book in a way that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t done that.”


Read the full article here . . .

This might seem like a hot take, but no one wants to read your opinion about a book. No one cares. We don't read books so we can learn what critics like or dislike about them. We read books to escape our lives, to be enriched, to enlarge our imagination. 

Book reviews are vital to the book publishing world. They help readers determine whether they will want to read a book. They're a major factor in book sales. If you want to be a successful book reviewer, you have to look beyond just your own complaints.

Read the full article here . . . 

Have you ever thought about memory? It's such an important tool in writing poetry, and yet we remember things without even realizing it. Every moment of every day, we're remembering our grocery lists, our tasks, but also the memories of emotion and love and wonder and fear. Memory gets us through our day.

Mary Oliver said the goal of revising is to write "memorably." So what makes a reader remember a poem? As children, we were taught to memorize poetry. But most readers usually only memorize poems they love as adults. 
 
Read the whole article here . . .

​Dates: March 1-28
Format: Group Workshop (more info)

From Plath to Sexton to Lorde to Walker, women are the backbone of experimental poetics. In this class, we’ll read the work of popular feminist poets and write our own poems inspired by their work. Audre Lorde said, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” By celebrating the work of the women who came before us, this workshop will explore how to dismantle the patriarchal conventions of poetry by diving into the canon of women poets.

Register at the early-bird price of $275 (regular price: $295) before February 15.

I had a blast chatting with folks this year at the virtual World Fantasy Convention! It was such an honor to get to answer questions about indie publishing and author marketing, and to get to be on a panel with some of my favorite poets. Here are the recordings for your watching pleasure: 

Agents and editors are looking for submissions that quickly set themselves apart. The stand-out submissions are fairly easy to locate. While all of slushing is somewhat subjective (as far as taste goes, we all have different loves and hates), I’ve noticed that there are a couple of things that are distinguishable between the stories I loved from a slush pile and the ones I passed over quickly.

Read the full article here . . .

I've read a lot of writing prompts in my time, and they all suck. Seriously. What is with this “Write a poem about a man who finds a dog on the side of the road and then he brings it home and then it eats his shoe . . .” prompt bull-honkey? (Okay, I made that prompt up, but that’s how most of them sound.)

Read the full article here . . . 

We’re all being forced to slow down right now, and some of us are better at it than others. But I’ve noticed that writers, and creatives in general, are really, really bad at this.

Read the full post here . . . 

Thanks to J.A. Sullivan for reading the Coppice & Brake Anthology from Crone Girls Press, and this lovely review of my story "The Red Shoes."

One of the stories I enjoyed most, “The Red Shoes” by Holly Lyn Walrath, is a perfect example of unexpected twists. Walrath gives us a story of a lonely old witch in a deserted forest. You would expect that when the witch finds a lost girl (“A lovely redheaded thing curled in the litter of the forest floor like a fairy in bracken”), she would immediately make a meal of her, as the witch had done with so many other helpless children through the years. Yet she doesn’t. Obsessed with the past when trolls, werewolves, and other sorcerers called the woods home, the old woman casts a spell on a pair of red shoes for the girl. But magic rarely brings us the things we most desire, especially not without a hefty price. This was a beautifully written story with sharp images, and it reminded me of being a child, listening to Grimms’ Fairy Tales for the first time.

Read the full review here . . . 

I’m reading the poetry book submissions for Interstellar Flight Press, it occurs to me that a lot of writers struggle to put together poems for a collection. But when the right congregation of poems appears, it’s so exciting as an editor. Poems, when collected, have the ability to speak to each other in new and interesting ways not explored in their individuality.

Read the full article here . . . 

Do you ever think as humans we’re just afraid to get our hands dirty? That we’ve engineered our lives to be as perfect, pristine, and efficient as possible? And that maybe, if we aren’t perfect, then we’re failures?

I’m trying to abolish this idea from my creative life. The idea of perfection.

Read the full article here . . .

Around November, Writing Twitter starts talking about the end of the year. It’s NaNoWriMo, so people are often talking about writing anyway. But also, it’s the time of the year when, if you’re a writer in science fiction or fantasy, you should be posting your “What I Published This Year,” or “Awards Eligibility” post.

A lot of writers use this time to celebrate the works they’ve published over the year and encourage others to nominate them for best of lists and prize consideration, like the Pushcart Prize or Hugo Awards. Journal editors on the literary side announce their nominations for the Pushcart around this time. 2019 is also the end of a decade, so now people are also posting encouraging writers to share what they accomplished in the last decade. We’re sharing pics of ourselves in 2009 and 2019 to show the passage of time.

But I know that a lot of creatives struggle with all this.

Read the whole post here . . . 

I love the above image. It’s a photograph taken at Natural Bridge State Park, where someone has carved this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien into a walking path. J.R.R. Tolkien probably never imagined the life his work has taken on after his death — that someone would take the time to carve his words in a public space. In fact, I know he didn’t.

John Hendrix, an artist, recently posted a quote from Tolkien’s diary while he was writing Lord of the Rings. It reads:

Friday 14 April: ‘I managed to get an hour or two’s writing, and have brought Frodo nearly to the gates of Mordor. Afternoon lawn-mowing. Term begins next week, and proofs of Wales papers have come. Still I am going to continue “Ring” in every salvable moment.’

Read more here . . .

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online community and yearly event where writers make the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, I’m encouraging you to burn the frigging thing down.

Read how here . . . 

I have a new article up at Medium today on the economics of short fiction, how commercialism is changing what writers write, & a bit of advice from Shirley Jackson.

“The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were.” — Shirley Jackson (“Memory and Delusion,” Published in Let Me Tell You.)​

Read the entire article here . . . 

What if you woke up tomorrow knowing without a doubt you could write a bestseller? Paint a picture worth a million dollars? Release an album that was guaranteed to go to #1 on the charts?

What would you do?

This is the question behind Yesterday, a charming movie that pays homage to the works of The Beatles by erasing them from the world. Yesterday is a “what if” movie — What if The Beatles never existed? Himish Patel (best known for his work on the British soap Eastenders) plays down-on-his-luck musician Jack Malik, who wants someone to like his music other than his best friend Ellie (played by Lily James).
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Read the entire article at Medium . . . 

I have a new article up at Medium today! As a writer, it can be really hard to keep going. One way I keep myself motivated is by celebrating the small things. Sure, I was over the moon the first time I got a poetry acceptance. But I’ve learned that to keep going, you need to celebrate every little step. Every time I hit a new milestone, I try to appreciate that moment, because it validates all the hard work, long hours, and general malaise that being a writer sometimes entails. I love writing, but writing is hard.

Read the whole list here . . . 

This month I have a guest post up at the Horror Writer's Association on the theme of dark poetry called "Darkness and Light." if you're a HWA member, be sure to check it out! If you're not a member, you can read it on Curious Fictions for $1 or by subscribing to my feed.

Hybrid poetry forms can be a powerful form of resistance. From Jerrod Schwarz’s erasure of Trump’s inaugural speech to Niina Pollari’s black outs of the N-400 citizenship form, contemporary poets are engaging with the world through text, creating new and challenging works of art. Heralded by the rise of the “Instapoet,” visual works are a way to take poetry one step further by crafting new forms and structures that often transcend the page. 

In July, I'll be teaching a 4-week course online at the Poetry Barn on this very topic! We’ll study the forms of poetry that draw from outside sources and texts, learning how artists are reshaping the narrative of resistance and how to draw from news, media, canonical works, and other found texts to create our own work in conversation with the current world.

Click here to sign up for online workshop . . .