Blog
WRITING
720 pages and still no book
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 memoir, and a...
12 things about traditional publishing that’ll ruin your day
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...
Jack of all trades, master of none
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 waiting for clarity, depth of...
The morning we got lost and found out who we were
It was Good Friday, roughly 6:30 in the morning, the kind of cold spring day that makes you question your life choices. Three of us — all marathon running buddies, all colleagues at the same chemical company in the next town over — laced up our shoes in a parking lot...
READING
I once tried to hire a Navy Seal to babysit
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 when she...
Why I just lost two hours to a vegan TikTok (and what it taught me about your book)
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 near-death...
That tell-all you’re dying to write? Read this first.
I'd heard about Careless People long before I finally cracked it open in the airport. It had been sitting in my Kindle alongside all the other fantastic books I swore I’d eventually get to. But once I started the memoir, I couldn't put it down. Which was great,...
What I’m legally allowed to tell you about the 7 people living rent-free in my brain
People sometimes ask me what it's like to run a hybrid publishing house. The short answer? It's like being a professional eavesdropper who gets paid to learn everyone's secrets—except the secrets are actually really fascinating expertise, and instead of whispering...
LIFE
The morning we got lost and found out who we were
It was Good Friday, roughly 6:30 in the morning, the kind of cold spring day that makes you question your life choices. Three of us — all marathon running buddies, all colleagues at the same chemical company in the next town over — laced up our shoes in a parking lot...
The half-life of relevance (and why panicking won’t save you)
Walt and I have this conversation probably once a month. Who was that woman — the one who wore purple and taught people to sell from the stage? Where'd she go? We genuinely cannot remember her name. And here's the thing: a few years ago, she was everywhere. Speaking...
I bought a cottage in Ireland. You can write a damn book
Have you put your book dream on the back burner because you can already think of ten reasons it won't work? I was watching a fox and her two kits bound across the field one morning as Walt and I drank our first cup of coffee. In the upper pasture, a herd of dairy cows...
The woodcutter who wouldn’t take my money
When we lived in Ireland, a neighbor advertised his wood-cutting services with a hand-painted sign along the road. He'd bring a cord of wood over, and instead of dumping it on the lawn and driving away like any self-respecting American contractor, he'd stack it in the...
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