Recent Posts For Creative Writers: Your Sanity and Mine

Posts at the Sanity Blog, located at Catherine's home, BookEval.com

Workshop Advice That Will Ruin Personal Essays

Bored with Death
Don't write about your uncle's cancer and death. Write about his life.

Pumping Up Prose Style
Competence is not enough anymore.

And I hope you read:

Coffee Makes You FaT

A Writer with $10

11 Lessons from National Novel Writing Month
("the fourth dimension of any novel is its moral dimension")

Interview with First-Time Novelist Peter Leach
(while he waited, he wrote 16 more novels)

Latest Posts in the Sanity Bubble

Mental Health for Writers has moved here to the Sanity Blog. New posts worth your while include:

On Giving Up My Land Line (July 15)
I've Had Enough of "You" (Second Person Plural) in Poetry (June 16) (gosh; this one's really popular!)
Two "Things" That Will Improve Your Poems (June 9)
What's "A Rhetorical Poem"? and Why Nobody Tells You About Them (June 7)
A Rare Look Inside the Writer's Cabin (June 4)
"Blue" Material (May 29)

Recent Blog Posts in the Sanity Bubble

• How to Destroy a Writer's Conference (May 20)
• E-Books Outsell Paperbacks for the First Time (May 13)
• How Do I Get My Book Reviewed? (May 12)
• My Mom For President (May 8)
• Good Books with Not-So-Good Covers (May 8)
• Choosing a Book Cover: A Matter of Self-Respect (May 8)
• Anxious Authors (May 5)
• Deconstructing Online Dating Profiles (May 3)
• Meet Us May 7 at Left Bank Books (April 30)
• A Battle in the Pay-the-Writer War (April 25)
  

Please change your bookmark to http://www.bookeval.com/sanity-bubble

New Blog Posts

Recent posts in the Sanity Bubble; comments welcome:

• Literary Lies (April 19)
• Why the Agent Stops Reading at Page 2 (April 15)
• Talking With: Alice Azure, Native American Author (April 14)
• Here's a Rejection I Like (April 12)
• The Myth of the Lone Writer (April 11)
• Time Trick That Works (April 8)
• Turning Away from Toxic Friends (April 5)
• Why Katie Couric Didn't Wash (April 3)
• Writing an Author a Fan Letter (April 2)
• They Don't Want You to Write (March 28)
• Scary Me: I Get a Clue (March 27)
• I Want to Be Another Poet (March 26)
  

Catch Up on the Blog

Go to the Sanity Bubble for new posts:

The King and I (24 March)
Coming: Professional-Writer Certification (22 March)
The Fake Job Interview (21 March)
St. Louis Indie Bookstore Alliance Goes Wild (13 March)
Using "Dialect" in Poetry and Prose (5 March)
What's Wrong with Flashbacks (3 March)
Don't Let Your Prologue Give Your Novel Away (3 March)

New Mental Health Entries

Click here for these new entries:

• Creative Nonfiction Has Begun to Suck (24 February)
  
• How Embarrassed I Am, Part One (21 February)
• Did You Accidentally Hire a Poet? A Checklist (15 February)
• Recap of UMSL Small-Publishers Panel (12 February)
• The First Writer I Ever Saw (10 February)
• When Three People Show Up (10 February)

The Mental Health for Writers blog has moved to www.bookeval.com/sanity-bubble. Other than that it ain't no different. Please change your bookmark.

Blog Has Moved - and Been Renamed - Go There!

Hello. My new online home including the blog (now renamed "Sanity Bubble") is BookEval.com. You can leave comments on the entries as usual. I will eventually move all 300 blog entries onto that site. Come see my amazing new space! Thank you so much.

The Beginning

The story of this picture: These are the Guilty Pleasures authors, the Doves, my writing group from 2000 to 2007. We got a book accepted in 2002 and published in spring 2003. In August of 2002 we had a group author photo taken. We fooled around with all sorts of different "guilty pleasures" props (tiaras, etc.) and were inexperienced enough to choose as our jacket photo a more serious one than this, but this remains my favorite. The original is indeed in black and white -- remember, I think all book-jacket photos should be black and white! Left to right: Patti Smith Jackson, Jane Holwerda, me, Cathy Luh, Holly Silva, Karen Hammer, Sue Caba and Laurie Vincent.

This blog has been moved to classier quarters: the Sanity Bubble at www.bookeval.com/sanity-bubble. I'm still posting there! Every visit, every comment, is an honor for me. Go there, be confident, and take care of yourself, because....

. . .you are fate's finest instrument.