Category Archives: Writerly Words

When you are an unagented author with a plot thrilling your heart, an antagonist disturbing your dreams, and an unpubbed manuscript collecting stray bits on your hard drive, you rewrite.  I’ve been the fortunate recipient of some targeted advice from a kind and insightful agent, so naturally, I have endeavored to apply it. Or, as my writing buddies so eloquently stated, “You’d be stupid not to.”  One can’t argue with such literary powers of persuasion.  To that end, I have, as of today, completed said rewrite.  I have six copies going out to people whom I both admire and trust …

  November blew in and out sans any new blog posts from me.  I’d like to say I was on deadline for an eager publisher, but I’m still rewriting my novel based on the kind invitation to resubmit from an agent with a sense of humor.  Now I got that kind invitation back on October 1st, but I had a few weeks of serious mulling, moping, mapping anew.  And a dear, sweet friend came to visit who has earned my undivided attention.  But a subroutine kept working on plot details even while we danced to Stevie Wonder’s Superstition at three …

A written work bears the baggage of so many emotional comparisons: one’s dream, one’s baby, a piece of one’s soul, the spilling of one’s vein.  Downright fraught with the personal, yet we’re not supposed to take critique personally. Asking for critique invites another human permission to comment on your work.  Riskier than wading barefoot through a South American river-the piranha can only rend your flesh.  Certainly feedback from an agent is a personal assessment, but that’s not how we are supposed to take it.  We’re supposed to shrug, turn the page, and continue writing. Tough business.  True dat. It’s important …