By Jason Lefebvre My first attempt at writing a picture book came in 1998. I thought the story was amazing. It wasn’t. Fortunately, I was twenty-two years old, I had just completed my Bachelor’s degree in English, and I knew everything. I spent the next year of...
By Patricia Keeler A Wannabe I sat on the bed and put my feet up on the bathtub. Something was tapping on the window. But the glass was painted over, so I didn’t know what. I’d made it to the tiny New York apartment of a friend of a friend of a...
By Matt Harry, author of Sorcery for Beginners Bullying plays a key part in my debut novel Sorcery for Beginners. The main character, Owen Macready, is 13-years-old and the new kid at his school in Henderson, Nevada. He just wants to keep his head down, but one day,...
By Heather Cumiskey, author of I Like You Like This It’s easy to want to abandon your book or short story just as it’s getting hard. Like when your momentum suddenly stalls, characters get quiet, or that pestering voice in your head tells you that your writing...
By Amy S. Foster We’ve all heard the stories about why some kids are bullies. They feel bad about themselves, they suffer from poor self esteem, they want others to feel as bad as they do, their home life is troubled…Adults can look at these factors and explain, quite...
By Dori Jones Yang Confession: I am not a Chinese boy living in 1870s Connecticut. I was not alive in the 1870s. I have never lived in Connecticut. I am not a boy. And I am not Chinese. Whew! Got that off my chest. We writers of historical fiction are called to...