I’m back from my writing retreat. I did not drink my bottle of wine. I did do a tremendous amount of work on my novel. I did not yet settle on which Living Arrangements excerpt(s) to read. I did confirm details for my book launch party December 1 in Cleveland — more info on that [...]

By the time you read this, I will already be well into my writing retreat. But before I left, I made a list of some of my goals: • Figure out and finish revisions to Part III of my novel. • Address other revisions/edits/structural changes in the novel. • Practice reading aloud from Living Arrangements [...]

This weekend, while plugging away on novel edits, all these ideas and plans for my next novel interrupted my work. I’ve been walking around with the general premise of this new novel for a while now, but this was the first time I actually started writing down notes. I could barely keep up with all [...]

An anonymous writer asked Betsy Lerner if she should keep plugging away at her YA novel, which she describes as a “painful” process, or instead ride the wave of success she’s had selling bits of her memoir to various publications. In other words, should she abandon her novel to give in to her current writing [...]

At this time last year, I was scrambling to write 2,000 words of my novel every day. Thank god I’m not doing that again this year. A variety of miscellaneous writing-related deadlines have popped up all at once. I can no longer put them off by telling myself I’ll get on it right after the [...]

When I started writing this post, it had an entirely different message. See that little green gummi bear? That was supposed to be me, feeling left out because I’m not doing NaNoWriMo even though it seems like everyone else in the world is. I’ve never done NaNoWriMo. I’ve been telling myself that I should give [...]

My novel Opal (submitted under the title Finding Opal) was named a runner up in the 2010 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. This is absolutely fantastic news and, to be honest, I never imagined this result when I submitted the opening chapters of the novel back in February. The novel was just so new. I [...]