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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…