October 2019 was a rough month for me. Two weeks after Robyn died, I had another major panic attack that forced me to go to Howard University’s ER. When I returned to Raleigh, I began my last week of work at Caterpillar. I was riddled with anxiety as I drove to each factory. When I […]

After I finished my final edit in May 2020, I quoted professionals at Reedsy. I chose a copy-editor and walked away from the book for several weeks. I visited family and hung out with Finley, my golden retriever puppy. While waiting for feedback from Cindy, I approached several beta readers and asked them if they […]

Using Robyn’s writing lessons and guidance from the deep scenes book, I revised the manuscript several times during the spring of 2020. I reviewed every scene. What were the protagonist’s goals, and how was the antagonist trying to thwart those goals? What kind of scene was it? An escape scene? Lay of the land scene? […]

During the summer of 2018, I submitted query letters to thirty agents and received rejections from twelve of them. The rejections were politely and professionally written.  One wasn’t a standard rejection, however; the agent gave subtle feedback. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “your beginning just isn’t pulling us in the way we had hoped.” Only later did […]

I watched Lord of the Rings on a flight from Curitiba, Brazil, to Houston, Texas. It was 2015, and I had spent a week in Brazil for work. I forget which of the three films I was watching, but as the confined space on airplanes enables both focused attention and wandering, something creative unlocked within […]