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Another good round of questions this week, writers. Sometimes your questions can be easily answered with a list of DOs and DON'Ts, or a flow-chartesque "if this then that" scenario. But not always.  We have one of each this week, as one writer needs clarity about the literary journal submission process and one writer is searching for the right balance of description in storytelling.

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A young bookseller puts a feather into his mouth...

...and that feather was Vurt, the Aurthur C. Clarke Award winning debut of English novelist Jeff Noon. It was sometime in the late 90's, and the pusher was a friend and co-worker operating in full peer pressure mode. "C'mon, hardly anybody's doing it," she intoned. Her logic appealed to the budding literary elitist in me, so with my friend acting as guide, I took the trip.

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The very first NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month, for the uninitiated) took place in July, 1999, in the San Francisco Bay area, consisting of a mere twenty-one participants.  The goal: hit 50,000 words by the end of the month.  Alas, the results were admittedly subpar and publication remained elusive, however, somewhere during the process an important discovery was made: it was fun.  Yes, writing with your friends and getting cracked out on power coffee and candy bars was actually a good ti

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Original image via Pexels

What the heck are we talking about?

Welcome to November. If you are participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), then you have just embarked on your month-long novelling odyssey. To help you reach your daily word counts, I’m going to focus on ways to enrich your description.