By Author: Barbara Samuel

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Below are the latest articles from Barbara Samuel. The results are culled from all sources Workflow: Writing follows.

• Take 5 with Jennifer Crusie

  • Monday, 30 Aug 2010, 03:39 UTC (2 weeks ago)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  Maybe This Time is Jennifer Crusie’s new book, landing on bookshelves everywhere today. This is her first solo novel since the wildly popular Bet Me, which won the 2004 RITA.) Maybe This Time is smart and quirky, brimming with the trademark Crusie repartee. Here, with a Take 5 to whet your appetites, is Jennifer Crusie. [...]

• The Writer’s Toolbox: Walking

  • Wednesday, 25 Aug 2010, 03:00 PDT (3 weeks ago)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  One of the number one requirements of a commercial fiction career is that you must reliably produce good material, year in and year out. Reliable and good are not always an easy combination. To do it, a writer has to take care of her body, her mind, and her spirit. Over the years, I’ve found [...]

• A Simple, Practical Secret Weapon

  • Wednesday, 28 Jul 2010, 04:00 PDT (28 July 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  As you read this, many of us at Writer Unboxed will be at the RWA conference in Orlando, where many of us will meet for the first time. In the meantime, I hope some of you can make use of this tool. A commercial fiction writer has to produce good material in a reliable, regular [...]

• A Few Things the Salty Ones Taught Me

  • Wednesday, 23 Jun 2010, 04:20 PDT (23 June 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  It would be impossible to compile all of the best things I’ve heard over the years, but I can think of a few that helped guide me, over and over. Write whole books Most of us do write whole books at the beginning of our careers, but then the pressure is on and most contracts [...]

• The Post Book Crash

  • Wednesday, 26 May 2010, 04:00 PDT (26 May 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  Last month, I finished my new book, How To Bake A Perfect Life, and sent it off to my editor and agent, who are both speedy readers. By the time I polished up a couple of talks for a conference and returned home, they had turned it around, and I plunged into revisions. [...]

• Layering in Depth of Character

  • Wednesday, 28 Apr 2010, 04:00 PDT (28 April 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  I’m about to dig into the revisions my editor and agent have suggested for my next book, (How To Bake A Perfect Life, out in January). It’s a complex story with a fairly large cast of characters and a complicated time structure. The tale is set in a bakery, more specifically a [...]

• The Power of Setting

  • Wednesday, 24 Mar 2010, 05:00 PDT (24 March 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  Two weekends ago, I participated in the delightful Tucson Festival of Books. While on a panel with Karen Joy Fowler, Margaret Erhart and Daniel Stolar, we fell into a discussion of the importance of setting and sense of place. We all expressed surprise and frustration at the lack of setting details that sometimes [...]

• Office Overhaul for Mental Overhaul

  • Wednesday, 24 Feb 2010, 03:00 PST (24 February 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  Therese blogged about ways to jumpstart your creativity. The subject has been on my mind a lot, because I’ve spent the past month overhauling my office. It’s a great, if ordinary, space–a bedroom upstairs overlooking the street and a view of Pikes Peak and the entire Front Range, which changes daily with light [...]

• Listen to YOUR Voice

  • Wednesday, 27 Jan 2010, 03:02 PST (27 January 2010)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  Your voice already exists, right now, every time you sit down to write. It is inescapable—your voice is you. Voices can be obscured, even buried, under avalanches of helpful advice and nudges to be more literary or more commercial or less gritty or less sexual, but it cannot be entirely lost.
  I was [...]

• Food-centered fiction vs adding recipes for local color

  • Wednesday, 30 Dec 2009, 03:00 PST (30 December 2009)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  My new novel, The Secret of Everything, hits the shelves this week. At the heart of the book is a restaurant called The 100 Breakfasts Café (which I really wanted to be the title for a long stretch). One of my favorite review quotes so far is from PW, who said the book shows “a [...]

• The Intersection of Truth and Fiction

  • Wednesday, 25 Nov 2009, 03:00 PST (25 November 2009)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  One of the questions that comes up for writers over and over again is, “how much of this book is true?”

  Every story a writer composes somehow emerges from the writer. But where to draw the line between truth and fiction might be hard to distinguish. I am not a character. The character is herself. Some of my experiences lend verisimilitude, perhaps, but mostly, I’m cobbling together bits of this and pieces of that, gathering anything and everything that might be helpful to create a sense of a whole world for a reader.

• Staying Healthy on a Writing Blitz

  • Wednesday, 28 Oct 2009, 03:00 PDT (28 October 2009)
  • By: Barbara Samuel, Writer Unboxed

  A good many of you will be writing madly for NaNoMo this month, trying to finish a book in 30 days. How will you stay healthy during this time? As a veteran of numerous NaNoMo’s (otherwise known as the deadline blitz), I have a few suggestions.