The first time I read in public (a Grub Street open mike event at Johnny D's in Somerville, Mass.), I sucked.

Years later (no more experienced) with my debut book launch looming, I had to do better. Pre-publication months were spent attending bookstore events with a...

Beginning a book is easier than ending it (at least for me.) A beginning is exciting and glittery, filled with excitement and hope. First sentences are sexy. They pop into my mind all the time. If I only had to write the first lines, I could write a million books

"No child could possibly be happy about her father moving out!"

The above was said to me at a writing workshop, in a discussion about my then unpublished novel (it eventually became The Murderer's Daughters.) The 'child' in question lived with a selfish, sarcastic, angry...

When I was a reader, I spoke as a reader, I understood as a reader.

When I became a writer, I read as a writer, I understood as a writer.

I just finished "Readers Don't Owe Authors S**T" on the online site Book Riot. The credo...

Who remembers shaking in bed while Mom and Dad fought?

"Damn it, Harriet, we can't go on like this! You're spending money like a drunken sailor, but I'm not seeing a dime!"

My sister and I are great liars. World-class liars. Maybe we were born with the trait (after all, our paternal grandmother's top hobby was shoplifting. Brooklyn-born Great-Aunt Sally (Jewish, like the rest of the family) pretended she was Catholic and French -- and went to the Sorbonne. She even spoke...

Should I hire a publicist?

If I hire someone, will the publisher do less?

New and experienced authors ask each other these questions often, consulting each other as though somewhere, someone has the answer,...

What to expect when you're expecting your book? What's going to happen first, and second, and third? For me, as I waited for the launch of my debut novel, I was overwhelmed with how much I had to learn, had never learned, and perhaps could/would/should have learned --...

The perfect first line. How we chase it, scrambling phrases and our brains, seeking magic words to pop open our stories like magic keys. (Sometimes I want to create an entire book because a great beginning sentence pops into my head.) Tougher, can be that last line; tougher because it's...

I suppose they were meant to teach me reading skills. And the goodness of clean living. But what the Bobbsey Twins taught me was gut-eating envy.

Freddie and Flossie Bobbsey's adventures are the first books I remember reading. Their stories educated me about a world from which I was deeply,...

"At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent." -- Golda Meir

I suspect that it's easier to find authentic novels about the difficulty of being...

Everyone has something that keeps them going when nothing else will do. For some it's cupcakes. Others choose wine. My husband has football. I have beauty magazines.

I'm not exactly sure where I get my make-up, hair product, fragrance and clothes jones. Partially from my mother, who could transform herself...

I'm wiggling back into my new novel, and like many complicated tasks -- knitting a sweater for an elephant, cooking a gluten-free banquet for four hundred vegans -- I need to regain my rhythm and whack my way through the awful stage where everything I write sounds like this:

Blah,...

"I distrust styles... To have a style is to be trapped."

I love books. Reading probably kept me from teen pregnancy, heroin, and robbing convenience stores with a badass boyfriend. I've read great books, good books, mediocre books, and books so awful they damaged my eyes, and it wasn't genre...

Upon hearing about Atria Book's plan for a multi-author twelve-city bus tour, I could only be grateful that it wasn't me who'd be stuck in a bus for umpteen days (Eight? Twelve? Two hundred? ) However long, I could only imagine bad food, cramped quarters, and the wheels of the...

I woke up (just moments ago) with the proverbial pounding 3 a.m. heart. I had a nightmare about trying to convince unresponsive authorities about young girls being attacked. The specifics of my nightmare don't matter (is there anything more boring than hearing someone recount their dreams point by point? It...

Recently, a thread in an online writer's community popped up, beginning with someone (who hadn't begun querying) asking why folks sent query letters to so many agents.

Did they have that many "dream agents?

Why not send to just one or two top choices?

And, really, how long does it...

"My definition (for myself) of a working title is: A title that doesn't work." -- Robin Black

Picture having a baby. You named that baby so soon after conception. Dear little Lev. It's the Russian version of your father's name. It has great meaning. Birth! The nurse places...

It's funny how folks who work at home (writers, painters, composers, phone-sex workers, though not those who use Skype visuals) will so often use working in my pajamas! as their number one perk.

But is it really true?

Is it still true, when hearing the UPS truck coming down the...

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint." --Socrates, with dispute about attribution

Sometimes you get lucky and you realize (in the midst of worrying about war, famine and the economy) that Socrates...