some months ago, my friend linda shared with me part of the story of her wife, jo, defending her dissertation. jo had studied and written extensively on queerness in detective fiction. at last, the time came for her to before the committee, which included a straight white guy. his first…

i had been writing this book world for a while. i knew where i wanted this book to go generally and specifically. i had a plan for each character. i found a good ending. i typed the end. and i felt empty. like i had lost something. why whywhywhywhy i…

1955: a career army officer and his wife are celebrating his (their) promotion. they get a little drunk (he’s an alcoholic) and have unprotected sex. she gets pregnant. with their fourth child. she is 35. she just got their third child out of the house and into school. she doesn’t…

hi, ex-catholic here. i’m seeing some people saying if we just threaten them hard enough, the dominionist judges will get scared and restore our abortion rights. nothing could be further from the truth. two reasons: 1) the catholic justices grew up venerating martyrs. people who were so fucking serious about…

we haven’t had the prologue talk recently, #amquerying friends, and based on timing, we’re due. a common question on this hashtag is if your submission package’s sample pages should include your prologue. no. they should not. because you should not HAVE a prologue. here’s why you should either rename your…

one of my favorite facts about america is that we would probably still be a british territory if a man who was being persecuted for having gay sex in europe hadn’t fled for the colonies. his name is baron von steuben, and he trained up george washington’s continental army. being…

we had a three-bedroom house. we had a school-age child. we had a younger child. we had a newborn. and we had a pregnancy we hadn’t planned for. we had said we’d do four. …

Over the past six years, I have edited roughly 1,500 initial query drafts. In a lot of them, a character, concept or detail is emphasized in the first or second sentence … and then never again. Here’s what I think is happening, then how to fix it. First, what’s happening: …

Last night, Angel Hernandez officiated a baseball game, which is to say that last night, Angel Hernandez ruined a baseball game. But I’m not going to offer the 945,306th article about Kyle Schwarber informing Angel — on behalf of a league of exhausted and irate fans— that he is the…