My Fears Were Not Realized

When I agreed to speak to 200 eighth graders, I thought, “How hard can it be? Adults talk to kids all the time.” But THIS adult has very little interaction with anyone under the age of 25 so needless to say, the fear set in very quickly.

Reading While Writing

The first few years that I was writing, I was convinced that if I read novels while actively writing my own, the styles of those already-published novels would somehow leak into my writing, making it unauthentic. I saved reading as a reward for completing drafts and would binge for several weeks, gobbling up the stories I’d …