<img class="size-medium wp-image-1059 lazyload" title="endofsumemr" src="https://ericswyatt.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/endofsumemr.jpg?w=200" alt="" width="200" height="300" /> Summer is winding down. Today starts my new season of focused writing. Credit: http://www.stockfreeimages.com/ Summer is tough for me. I write at home, and our current home is a small apartment where my office space is sitting right in the middle of everything. You can’t walk from one room to any othe

Last week a friend sent me this note, via Facebook: So, I’m struggling to get myself on a writing schedule. I remember your Craft Seminar being really informative, any chance you could send me some of your notes on setting up a good writing schedule? Notes. It made me laugh. My craft seminar notes are hundreds of pages (literally) shoved in a folder, at this point. “No. I can’t send you any notes,” I told her, “but I can write a blog post with some thoughts about scheduling.”

In Part One of the Write What You Know series, I talked a little bit about how limiting it can be if we take the advice offered by many folks who think they know what we should write about: “Write what you know!” Near the end of that post, I talked about an interesting phenomenon. Often, when workshopping a fiction piece, the sections that readers identify as “thin” or “unbelievable” or “not convincing” are those parts or pieces that are, in fact, closest to our actual experi

There’s an oft-quoted adage, “Write what you know!” which is simultaneously true and untrue. It is untrue because, as fiction writers, we are constantly adding details and experiences we don’t know from personal experience. Certain truths underpin our prose, but we express those things through characters and events and surroundings we don’t know from first-hand knowledge. It’s called “Writing the Other” and we do it all the time. But, on another level, the old adage is true.

Every month Amazon runs their $5 mp3 album special. 100 albums, on sale. I’ve bought a LOT of these $5 albums over the years, because they are such a good deal. (Especially some of the “best of” albums of folks who I want a sample of, but don’t want to collect every song they ever put out…) Often, I’ll tweet or post on Facebook if there is an album or two I am especially interested in, but I thought, why not just do a run down of the monthly offerings here on the blog. (Yes,

I had big plans for the summer. I really did. After I left the May writing residency at Queens University of Charlotte, this is what I planned to accomplish: Deep revision of the first 1/3 of my novel (Chapters 1-5 as it now stands) Finish first draft of the second 1/3 of the novel (it is about 80% written, but needs a lot of work, and a lot of “connections” work…) Edit and finish two short stories workshopped at the May residency and ready them for submission to literary mag