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
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
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 […]