a.k.a. Good Food

Writers Reading. That’s the name the Wilton Library gave our second appearance. My critique group, as I’ve previously mentioned, is blessed with the support of our library, which provides us with a meeting room every other week, regular speakers and workshops and, once a year, with a forum to preview our works in progress.
Tuesday [...]

Last weekend I attended Fiction Fest, sponsored by the Connecticut chapter of the Romance Writers of America (CTWRA). Obviously romance is not my genre, but there were writers of other genres there as well.

Having finally completed the manuscript of my first mystery, and being reluctant to go through yet another round of revisions, I decided to venture out onto the ‘net in search of people, places and knowledge that might be helpful.

For those of you who don’t subscribe to RSS feeds (and you should – there are some very good ones out there) I thought I’d pass along a question raised yesterday by Nathan Bransford: When do you start calling yourself “a writer?” And what about “author?”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m fortunate to live in a town with a dynamic library, one which actively supports the Arts in all forms: music, painting, sculpture, literature.
Yesterday I attended a library-sponsored workshop led by Susan Breen, author of The Fiction Class. This is the second time I’ve taken her workshop and I found it [...]

Hi, my name is Toni and I’m a closet perfectionist.
There, I said it. It’s a dirty little secret I’ve been hiding — not always successfully – for many years. I need to find a local chapter of Perfectionists Anonymous and attend weekly, if not daily, meetings. I suspect it’s a great place [...]

I applied for the NYC Pitch & Shop Conference with hope, trepidation, and a total ignorance of what to expect.  After 4 days I left with a finely honed pitch, 2 reads and 14 new friends with whom to celebrate successes, commiserate on rejections and share advice, opinions, and tips.  Pretty good bang for my [...]

Even though I’m single and childless, I’ve come to the (probably none too original) conclusion that writing a pitch takes about the same amount of time and effort as having a baby.
Deciding to write a pitch is analogous to “creating” a child. It’s a fun idea, it may be spontaneous or planned, and it’s [...]

Back in June, I was (self righteously) touting the benefits of using an outline when writing. I should heed my own advice. Now that my novel has reached the “revisions” stage, I decided to update the outline – a chore I’d been rather lax in completing on a regular basis. Something didn’t [...]

The “Pitch & Shop” workshop I’m going to next month gave us “homework” to complete before the first day’s session. We were instructed to go to library and pick out five books in our own genre, study the book jackets and analyze the pitches/synopses.
My first problem was that most of the book in my [...]