by AnnSheybani | May 8, 2026 | Writing
The Zoom rang at 7 AM my time. Evening in Bali. Kris sat in candlelight — she doesn’t like overhead bulbs after dark, never has. We hadn’t talked in a couple of years. She’s a former client, a fellow traveler in the long messy business of writing a...
by AnnSheybani | May 6, 2026 | Reading
Decades ago, back when my kids were just edging into adolescence, my best friend was a fellow single mother. She played cello in an orchestra, which meant she worked nights — orchestras don’t tend to perform at lunchtime — and I often kept her son at my place...
by AnnSheybani | Apr 25, 2026 | books, promotion, publishing, Reading
The other night Walt sent me an Instagram reel of a Korean American woman making army stew while she told a story about her father, as a teenager, running for his life from police who’d just gunned down student protesters in 1960. Her dad’s takeaway from a...
by AnnSheybani | Apr 20, 2026 | publishing, Writing
When I came out of grad school, writers had to bank on traditional publishing houses to choose them for a sense of worth and/or credibility. You could self-publish—it was called vanity publishing then—but that had all the panache of finding a spouse in the classified... by AnnSheybani | Apr 12, 2026 | Writing
If you have a bunch of interests, but don’t consider yourself a master at any one… If you’re afraid to choose one of these interests as a topic for an expert-positioning book because, you know, you’re hardly the master…. If you’re...
