“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
Recently I worked with an author on a first-chapters critique of the opening 50 pages of her manuscript. After our consultation she indicated she'd like to talk about doing a full developmental edit on the manuscript down the road, after she'd incorporated revisions based on our discussion. But first she wanted to know if I thought it was worth it for her to keep working on the story. Questions like this always bring me up short. My first reaction is always a lance of empathy, because I under...| 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
Stories aren’t primarily about the facts; they’re about the feelings—not just your characters’ emotions, but all of their inner life: what they make of what’s happening over the course of the story and how it affects them, makes them react, and influences their subsequent actions, behavior, and attitudes. That’s how you move the story forward, and how you develop the character arcs and show them moving along it—and much of hinges on what other characters do and say and how that ...| FoxPrint Editorial
Most creatives don’t set out to regurgitate remade versions of stories that have been told before. We want to boldly go where no storyteller has gone before, create utterly original tales, characters, and perhaps even story structure no reader has ever seen. Whether that’s even| 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
Authors are often the purveyors of hope. We are the ones who explore human nature and draw people together through story to find common ground. We are the ones who may offer a vision for a better world, the one we want to see and live in, the one we literally can create in the pages of our stories, the happy ending we long for. We are the ones who may record the forgotten people of history who helped bring us out of dark places, and the ones we invent who do the same for themselves, for their...| FoxPrint Editorial
Forging a career in publishing, as I've often written and spoken about, often encompasses an endless series of ups and downs. So often when we go into this field it feels as if once we can break through some closed door or hit some specific goal, it'll be smooth sailing for our c| 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
Much of the path toward mastering this craft we love as authors involves trial-and-error, stumbling and sometimes falling and learning how to right ourselves and avoid the same potholes going forward. It's so easy for writers to get discouraged—especially as we get older, and es| 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
