I recently returned from a combination research cum vacation trip. Hmmm. . .surely we writers need a portmanteau word for that, but I’m not quite sure what it would be. Anyway, during the trip, I had a chance to visit Sherwood Forest and imagine its past. Well, you’re in that part of England and you… Read more »
Hi, friends! Summer is officially here and we’re halfway through the year. Pretty crazy, right? Before we start heading towards fall, winter, and the end of the year, take some time to evaluate your author brand goals and progress. In a previous post, I talked about building your brand and one of the points I… Read more »
This August, we’re celebrating an awesome DIY MFA milestone—five years of our “Five on a Friday” series. The Five on Friday column is one of my favorite things that I get to work on every week. Why? Because while everything we do here at DIY MFA is for Word Nerds, these articles are often by… Read more »
Hey there word nerds! Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Mark Mayer to the show. Mark is an author and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Michener-Copernicus Fellow, and holds a PhD from the University of Denver. He was also the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Cornell… Read more »
Have you ever thought about how many marks you’ve made on paper in your lifetime? Starting as a doodling toddler, scribbling on your parents’ utility bills perhaps, then gripping a crayon in Kindergarten to draw a house and a tree, or to write your name for the first time. Later, you made a few grocery… Read more »
Self-publishing is many things: creatively empowering, professionally challenging, fun. One thing it’s not? Free. Okay, through the miracles of modern technology it’s possible to publish a book for virtually nothing, but you won’t produce a product people will want to buy. Remember, self-publishing is a business. If you want success, you’ll have to spend some… Read more »
It’s easy to take writing prompts for granted. Maybe because they’re so abundant, we wonder if they can really help that much. Maybe it’s because they’re so fun, it’s hard to take them seriously. Those suffering from writer’s block especially seem to go to extremes in their approach to prompts. On one side, blocked writers… Read more »
Hey there word nerds! Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Dan Stout on the show. Dan is an author who writes about fever dreams and half-glimpsed shapes in the shadows. His prize-winning fiction draws on travels throughout Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Rim as well as an employment history spanning everything from subpoena server… Read more »
You have sealed your passion-infused romance novel with the last two celebratory words: The End. Your cast of characters are so dynamic they jumped off the page and popped the cork on a bottle of bubbly and it didn’t faze you one bit. This describes writing that screams, “Make me a Series!” I wrote about… Read more »
Forewards, introductions, prefaces, and prologues can be important pieces of your manuscript—or they can be critical to avoid. So, it’s important to understand the differences between them. Using these terms correctly will assure editors and agents that you know your stuff and help you craft great front matter your readers won’t skip through. What is… Read more »
