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First things first....

If you’re like me—well, if you’re like me, I am terribly sorry, but that’s another thing entirely. Anyway, the relentless drumbeat of awful news has been getting to me lately. The other day my husband (I am still getting used to saying that, and I don’t think I will ever get tired of it) gave me a hug while I was in the kitchen making dinner, and he asked me what was wrong.

“Everything,” I said. It feels like that a lot.

For me, the antidote to despair is action, even a small one, especially when there are so many people who could use our help. If you feel so inclined, I found a number of organizations to give to directly at https://www.standwithminnesota.com/.

My stuff

(If you’re not nerdily inclined, please feel free to scroll past this section. My feelings will not be hurt. Much.)

As you know (Bob), I’m a writer, but I’m also a nerd. And when the two of these things get together, it can be really nerdy, but also a ton of fun. I recently wrote a short story inspired by a roleplaying game I participate in that’s run by fellow writer ’Nathan Burgoine. (Writing these stories and scenes is a practice called “blue-booking,” which I hadn’t heard of before I started playing this game.)

And… it will come as a surprise to exactly no one that it’s a Star Trek RPG. In other words, it’s a Star Trek story. I posted it over on my blog in case you feel inclined to read it.

And if you like it, you might like my novella The Final Decree, which a fellow writer likened to a great episode of Star Trek.

Books on writing that don’t suck

It probably comes as no surprise that I read a lot of books about the craft of writing. I went through a mini-binge of them near the end of last year and the beginning of this year, and a lot of them were… kind of underwhelming.

I’m not saying they were bad—as if I have any room to criticize, given my position in the whole field of writing. (Spoiler alert: I’m published but still practically unknown. You’re shocked, I know.) I read these books for a combination of reasons, including insights I can share with my students, strategies I can incorporate into my own teaching, and maybe something here and there that will help me with my own writing.

For whatever reason, though, many of them just didn’t connect with me.

This made me realize that all of the advice and suggestions I give to my students will be received in a similar way. Some of it will land, and some of it won’t fit them, nor or maybe at all. For someone else, The Artist’s Way will capture exactly how they feel about creativity. We Need Your Art will make them feel seen as an artist and give them the permission they need to unlock whatever work remains hidden within them.

As for me, here are a few books that did just that. I may have mentioned any or all of these before, but they’re notable in that they’re still working for me.

​Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell. I feel like I’m constantly recommending this book to anyone writing a novel. I used it to draft and revise one of the two novels I’m currently querying with literary agents, and it really helped transform my first draft into something tighter and more polished.

One of the things that works for me in Matt’s book is that he offers concrete strategies that you can apply pretty much immediately. I’m a big fan of actually doing things, so this really appeals to me. And he does all of this in a very compact volume.

​Dreyer’s English, by Benjamin Dreyer. If you don’t follow Benjamin on social media, I really encourage you to check him out. He’s witty, extremely knowledgeable about theater, and has an adorable dog he regularly posts pictures of. Before he retired, he was the copy chief for Random House and has worked on books by numerous illustrious authors and celebrities. This books collects a career’s worth of wisdom and knowledge in a reference book–style format, but it’s anything but dry.

​A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction,by Elizabeth McCracken. Full disclosure, I’m not done reading this, but I’m already sharing passages from it with my students. This one is landing with me in ways that I’d hoped some other books on writing would, but didn’t. It’s part writing advice and insights, and part memoir. It has a gently self-deprecating tone that never rings false to me, and in delivering anything that could be called advice, she makes clear that it may not work for you. It may not even work for her all of the time. Be open to changing your strategy until you find something that does.

That’s a useful insight when it comes to books on writing, writing teachers, and critique partners. Be willing to shift and experiment until you find something that works for you in that moment.

And that’s all for this very short month. See you in March!