5 Real-life Murders That Inspired My Novel, The Tokyo Covergirls

September 27, 2016.Reading time 4 minutes.

The night before I left for Tokyo, one of my friends, Andrea, burst into tears. I was 16 years old and was moving by myself to one of the world’s biggest cities to work as a fashion model. I don’t know what horror story was running through her mind at the time, she only told me she […]

Cover pages and other ways to lose friends . . .

August 23, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

The good news: my first round of cover proofs are in! The bad news: I am way pickier than I realized. On of my friends put together these mages for my novel cover earlier this week and while they are totally gorgeous they are totally not what I have been imagining in my […]

My Self-Publishing Experiment: THE COVER

August 11, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

First off, let’s be clear: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING. However, I spent enough time waiting for boys to call when I was 15 (note to teen self: they never do) to know when it’s time to stop doing the same thing with literary agents. That’s right, I have decided to embark on […]

Got feedback? Let me resent you for it

May 4, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

I am not good at feedback. Whenever someone in my writing group says anything that is the least bit critical about my work I hate their guts for about 3 – 30 seconds, depending on how much cheese I have consumed. Once I actually process said critique, I am always Incredibly Grateful for the insight they have gifted […]

Seth Godin’s Purple Cows for Queries

March 16, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

I finally figured out why writing query letters sucks (and I mean aside from the repeated stick-in-my-chest rejections): boredom. I have sent out twenty slightly-modified versions of the same query letter as of last week and frankly I’m tired of it. In fact, I think I may have a brown on my hands. According to […]

Literary Rejection: ‘Own it’, says Miss Snark

March 2, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

I was recently rejected by a literary agency. It went something like this: “The pages you sent are well-written and enjoyable, but unfortunately, J did not connect to the story as much as she was hoping to, and so she will not be offering representation” Of course, this happens a lot these days but this […]

The Joy of the Nightmare of Querying

February 22, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

Vanilla Ice said it best. “Love it or leave it you better gain weight, You better hit bull’s eye the kid don’t play.” Okay, that actually makes a lot less sense than I remember rapping as a teenager, but the key here is that there are some things that I really hate doing and writing query […]

Things that inspire me to write: the New Adult genre

January 23, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

Every cloud has a silver lining—or, in this case–a set of bare, chiseled abs. Entrenched in the dreaded manuscript-flog-phase I have spent the last few weeks researching agencies, compiling query letters and then receiving rejections from said query letters. And though it can be a little disheartening to read an inbox full of “Its […]

Something I learned about writing today: Covers matter…a lot

February 17, 2013.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Despite that saying about not judging books by covers and all that, they do. Big time. Just look at all the fervor generated by the recently released version of Anne of Green Gables, featuring a hot blond instead of the classic diminutive red head. I admit, the change is rather surprising, considering the many reference […]

Something I learned about writing today: It takes a village

February 12, 2013.Reading time 1 minute.

I don’t know if anyone else besides the author and the people listed within them ever actually reads them, but I have soft spot for Acknowledgments pages. They are like a little peak behind the scenes, a tiny glimpse into how the book in my hand was created. And sometimes a much needed lull at […]