Hi, friends. I’m back! Sorry for not posting for so long. This is the transcript of a spoken-word story I told at a Voices for Change concert last year, posted here now by request. The characters are Lily and Ezra of Like Light From Stars, and the story is from a teenaged Lily’s point of […]
Archive | Like Light From Stars
The Conference
The AWP conference is the biggest writers’ conference in North America. It happens in a different city every year and this year it was in Portland, so I went. I asked my favorite fashion-maven Liz Smith for shopping help so that I wouldn’t show up at the conference in my jammies. I am fashion-impaired and […]
Mrs. Schultz’s
I was disappointed when I didn’t get to go to the writing conference in San Francisco last weekend, but it’s possible that I was even more disappointed that we didn’t drive down Highway 101. We were planning to do that to avoid the snow on the pass. I was so looking forward to visiting the […]
A Little Valentine: San Francisco, 2004
This is a little valentine for my wife, Martha Shelley—a memory of the third time we got married. Looking for something else, I found an article I wrote back then for a magazine, and decided to rewrite it and post it here for Martha to see. Martha—remember this day? I heard about the San Francisco […]
A First Draft of the Pitch
By Sylvia Allen on February 5, 2019 in Getting published, Like Light From Stars, Sylvia Allen, Writer
At the writers’ conference next week, I’ll have to pitch my novel to as many suitable agents as I can manage. I will have only, like, three minutes to say what the book is about in such a way that the agent is interested in hearing (or reading) more. I just wrote a first draft […]
Going to the San Francisco Writers Conference
By Sylvia Allen on January 28, 2019 in Getting published, Like Light From Stars, Sylvia Allen, Writer
I’m going to the San Francisco Writers Conference! It’s February 12-17. I’m going to this particular conference because the novel that I’m trying to publish is very definitely set in San Francisco. I went in 2016 and had a wonderful time but did not use the contacts I made in any kind of useful way. […]
Why Won’t They Talk to Me?
I thought it would be easy. Don’t we old people love to talk about our memories of the past? You generally can’t get us to shut up. Yet so far I have not managed to interview anyone at all. Why won’t they talk to me? I asked respectfully and carefully. “Nancy, I’ve so enjoyed your […]
Sending Agent Query Emails (It’s Scary)
My website was down for a whole week, so I missed my Monday blog post, sorry. Here it is now. I hereby promise to send at least one agent query a week. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it is actually pretty labor-intensive. First you have to identify agents to query. One way […]
Thoth Delivers a Kick in the Pants
I had a dream that standing in front of me was a tall pale person with a bird’s head and a long, pointed beak that curved slightly downward. It had black feathers or hair in that style that used to be called a mohawk, from the top of its head and falling down its back, […]
His Heart Was Still Beating (Civil War)
This scene from Like Light from Stars takes place in a mule cart used as an ambulance, late in the American Civil War: In a cloud of red dust, a wagon clattered along a plank road between ravaged fields. The driver, a Union soldier in a filthy uniform, beat at the mule team with a switch. His […]