When I was a young (much younger) writer tackling my first story with pencil and paper, I believed that I was embarking on a lonely career where I would lock myself away for months while I exercised my genius to emerge with a novel ready for publication. Accolades and creativity would be enough to drive me. Surprise, surprise, my authoring life didn’t go as planned. Not even close. Fast-forward many years later to me in college where I’m still doggedly pursuing a creative writing degree because I am too stubborn to consider changing course and too in love with the craft to give it up. It was in the classroom setting that I realized how monumentally important having other people cheering me on was to my writing process. Having a set deadline to turn in my work for class was also helpful in motivating me to complete projects. Now thatRead More

This penultimate installment of the Writer’s Toolbox is a resource I’ve used over the past few years when looking to publish my short stories. It can be overwhelming to try and search for the right home for a story if a writer decides to go the traditional publishing route. I know a simple Google search wasn’t very helpful in my case, with dozens of sites and ads trying to catch my attention (and my money). While I was at a small writers’ conference a few years ago, one of the presentations was about a tool I had never heard of before. I’ve since used it to help me home my published short stories. The Submission Grinder is a no fee, nonprofit database of publishers for all genres and lengths of writing. Although it’s still a growing list (I’ve added a couple of publishers to their list myself), it is theRead More

For this installment in the Writer’s Toolbox, I wanted to share a resource that has helped motivate me to write when I struggled with the desire to keep going. Since 2008, the Hugo winning podcast, Writing Excuses, has been putting out weekly episodes to help instruct, inspire, and motivate writers. Howard Tayler, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Brandon Sanderson host the podcast with a myriad of special guests that offer wonderful insights. The episodes don’t run too terribly long (the tagline is “Fifteen minutes long, because you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart”), so it’s easy to play one in between tasks, or if you’re like me, binge an entire season in a week or two. Right now, Writing Excuses is in its 16th season, so there are quite a few episodes to catch up on. If that seems daunting, feel free to jump in and listenRead More

In the spirit of Black History month, I decided that the inaugural tool I wanted to add to the Writer’s Toolbox is a gem I stumbled across when I was researching how to describe characters of color in my story with equity and respect. Writing With Color is a site specifically geared towards writing. There’s no need to twist or fold the advice to make it fit your writing project; no fitting a circle into a square here! The Spring Conference I attended a year ago opened my eyes to some of the pitfalls I was inadvertently falling into in my early writing. The advice and suggestions found on Writing With Color have enriched my descriptions and made me a more conscientious writer. Instead of regurgitating the same list of adjectives that writers have used in the past, I have a tool to push myself into coming up with evenRead More