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 | 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...
by AnnSheybani | Apr 3, 2026 | Life, Writing
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...
by AnnSheybani | Mar 27, 2026 | Life, Writing
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...
by AnnSheybani | Mar 23, 2026 | Life, Writing
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...
