According to James Scott Bell in his book, Write Your Novel From The Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pantsers and Everyone in Between, every successful story contains what he calls a “magical midpoint moment” or “look in the mirror moment” where a single moment in the middle of the story pulls together the entire narrative… I had previously associated this “mirror moment” with fiction, and only fiction–one of the many secret ingredients in a well-crafted story that engages an audience. Now I realize it also applies to me.
I can’t believe this is happening. Can you?
Sometime in January, the universe sneezed, our space-time continuum shifted, and our metaverse got switched with another. Somehow we got stuck in someone else’s pandemic novel. Or this is proof we’re all living a simulation, like Neo, and somebody with a warped sense of humor introduced a new glitch in the Matrix. I guess it depends on whether you like getting your stories from books or movies. I’m a writer. I like books. I also like cool sci-fi movies. Don’t make me choose favorites.
Hello world! I got myself a new website! Why? Because, it turns out, getting my awesome debut novel published is going to take longer that I expected. Which means I’m not bringing in a paycheck. Because folks, while Wix is a very cool and easy to use, it’s kind of pricey at $168 a year when you don’t have a published novel to sell.
Earlier this year in May, I ran across a homework assignment in my son’s state-mandated, eighth grade sex-ed curriculum that infuriated me.
A few interesting things have happened in the past few months since I published my last blog post: 1. Obnoxious emails that appear to be sent from my own email address, the one I use to query literary agents, began filling up my spam folder.
I did a DuckDuckGo search for the words “when is a final draft finished novel” (I try to avoid Google) and found, at the top of the search results, a class offered by the Iowa Summer Writing Festival titled The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel. In other words, the answer to this innocuous question is valuable enough to be turned into a commodity that can be exchanged in the free market for money, like pork bellies.
When I began querying literary agents this past spring, I believed they would fall in love with my awesome first chapter and my amazing writing (go ahead, laugh). They did not. After thirteen rejections, three no-replies, and an overpriced online Writers Digest course on what literary agents look for in a query, I think I know why.
As a parent of two children, I read Ms. Szalai’s review of Senator Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult because I want to raise my kids to become responsible, self-reliant adults. I did not expect a condescending, political diatribe.
In the September Pub Rants blog post from Nelson Literary Agency, “9 Story Openings to Avoid, Part 4,” they posed a fun challenge to craft a brief opening scene from these six lines of dialogue…
As I approached the back wall of the house, I held my right hand before me and sliced down, slicing through the air with my hand, then walked through the wall instead of colliding into it. But instead of walking through and ending up on the other side of the wall, I found myself in a black void where nothing existed, as if I literally walked outside the parameters of the dream…





