If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. This morning I received an email from an author I’ve been working with on a multiple-pass edit wanting to cancel the rest of our contract, saying that she’d lost faith in her story and her ability to write it and had to...| FoxPrint Editorial
“Why is it every time a new thing is invented humans immediately try to use it for porn?” That’s a memorable quote from an episode of The Good Place, a favorite show the hubs and I are delightedly rewatching—but what struck me as we watched it last night was that the same seems| FoxPrint Editorial
People-watching is some of the most instructive work we can do for creating richly and fully developed characters on the page. Seeing how people interact, their demeanor and affect and mannerisms, all gives us tools for bringing characters to life on the page and letting readers| FoxPrint Editorial
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. My husband and I are different types of travelers, in ways that reflect our very different personalities. I am a planner. I like to learn as much as I can about a place we’re planning to visit, what there is to do...| FoxPrint Editorial
Given what we know about how easily modern tech tools can creep into taking over an outsize place in our lives, it’s worth being mindful and intentional about how we’re using them. The more we think through how we avail ourselves of AI capabilities in our writing and careers, the better we can create a relationship with it that allows us to not only tap the potential benefits, but safeguard ourselves against the possible drawbacks and dangers to our work. Rather than going right away to A...| FoxPrint Editorial
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. Over dinner with friends the other night, I commented in conversation that I had recently deleted all the social media apps off my phone. Their eyes got big. “Wow,” one said. “Good for you,” the other ch| FoxPrint Editorial
“Editing your own writing can feel like doing your own brain surgery.…” After you’ve completed your manuscript and you’re standing at the foot of Revision Mountain, climbing to the summit can feel impossible. It’s hard to look at your own writing with the objective eye needed| FoxPrint Editorial
I recently encountered an AI writing issue in my work that I should have foreseen yet somehow didn't. An author turned in a second-round revision of a story that was already very good when I saw it in its first-draft form, but needed development and deepening, as many early dra| FoxPrint Editorial
A publishing company recently made a splash in publishing industry news by announcing that they hope to “disrupt” the book business by publishing around 8,000 titles a year using AI to automate much of the production cycle. They advertise that if you give them a manuscript, withi| FoxPrint Editorial
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. That’s a bleak blog title, and this post is going to get bleaker before it gets better, but come with me if you want to live. Not long after ChatGPT was widely unveiled I asked the artificial-intelligen| FoxPrint Editorial
How much of our lives do we regard as items on our to-do list? We often speak of obligations, responsibilities, duty—all the things we have to take care of before we can allow ourselves to work on what we want to. But the truth is, as the cliché goes, the only things we have to do are die and pay taxes (and judging by the loophole-riddled tax returns of high-profile billionaires and government officials, the latter is apparently optional too). Most things in our lives are things we choose ...| FoxPrint Editorial
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. Last week my husband sent me this terrifying article—a Microsoft study about the 40 jobs likely to be most imminently impacted by AI and the 40 that might be safest. I’m going to let you guess where writ| FoxPrint Editorial
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. Over lunch with a friend last week, I told her I was working with the idea of tolerating discomfort in my life. She literally shuddered. “I don't even like to think about that,” she said. I couldn’t blam| FoxPrint Editorial
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. This is not the way that phrase is usually deployed, of course—instead we get the über-American, ultra-type-A, seriously pressure-inducing, “Failure is not an option!” But I’ve been thinking a bit about| FoxPrint Editorial
The Great and Terrible Power of No in Your Writing| FoxPrint Editorial
Don’t be afraid to try things--even things that may seem far, far out of the box. You're not always writing broad stories, but this is advice I've offered many authors in every type of story who may be holding themselves back in the interest of finesse and subtlety and not spoon-feeding readers. Those can be good instincts, and valuable for creating believable and effective stories, but sometimes we're holding ourselves back too much, fearing that if we give ourselves too much rein, our sto...| FoxPrint Editorial
As creatives we are constantly facing choices—many of them in our art blessedly malleable, at least until we’ve published our stories (and even after that, if we indie publish). If you don’t like one path you’ve sent your character down, you can hit delete and let them travel a n| FoxPrint Editorial
There’s a time-honored, romantic image of authors: the solitary genius who lives within the rich worlds in their heads, pecking away at their keyboard in their little attic hideaway or stolen corner of their home, or sitting alone at a busy coffeeshop insulated from the bustle around them with heads bent over their laptops, lost in their own imagination. In almost all cases the recurring motif is solitude, the artist making their art in isolation, the pure act of creation that springs from ...| FoxPrint Editorial
Advice to authors to create a newsletter is ubiquitous, and the reasons are generally solid. It's a direct line of communication to people who are very interested in your work. It's a platform that's totally within your own control and ownership, and the mailing list is your own,| FoxPrint Editorial
"I have been in the revenge business for so long, now that it's over I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.” I’m betting you’re familiar with Inigo Montoya’s rudderless feeling—when you finish a manuscript, when you send it out for submission, when your book is fina| FoxPrint Editorial
I have two very different dogs. Alex (Alexander the Great Pyrenees) is, true to his breed, as laconic a dog as has lived. He pretty much has one setting: giant lapdog. He’s never so happy as when he’s taking it easy and being loved by literally any human being on the plane| FoxPrint Editorial
When I’m working on an edit for an author’s story, the first thing I ask myself once I finish my first cold read—before I start on the deep-dive edit, before I even consider any other story elements—is, What is the central story question? This is what tells me what the manusc| FoxPrint Editorial
Writing starts out as pure enjoyment, but it's a skill that is far more involved and complex than it may initially seem. This past week I spoke with a writer who has literally decades of experience and is a major bestselling author. She's on her third pass of the manuscript we'| FoxPrint Editorial
In an ever-changing industry where you’re expected to master both craft and business—juggling your writing with marketing demands, budget constraints, social media, and more—how do you maintain your passion and build a thriving writing career? This is a survival manual for aut| FoxPrint Editorial
FoxPrint Editorial offers developmental and line editing services to help you polish both your story and prose, agent pitch session coaching, and writing workshops.| FoxPrint Editorial
If someone told you right now that you’d never be published, or that wherever you are as a writer now is the most you would ever achieve…would you stop? Recently I posted this article in the Guardian about the financial realities of being a writer on my social media (see links| FoxPrint Editorial
So often we're busy measuring our lives and our success by the lacks--what we haven't accomplished yet, our goals that we feel we've fallen short of. But what if we flip that around—look not at the empty space in our glass, but how much we've managed to fill it?| FoxPrint Editorial
