I finally accomplished my most procrastinated writerly task: my website. After learning how to use WordPress, taking photos, and setting up email forwarding, I was excited to assemble my publication credits. But when I looked for the link to a piece of flash fiction I published in 2016 by A Long Story, Short, I couldn’t find it. The website was gone. Everyone always warns that the internet is forever— that things...

Other than a writer’s time, editing services can be one of the costliest purchases for a manuscript. However, paying an editor will increase your final project’s value. Whether you are considering hiring a copyeditor for your fifth published book, or you are halfway through your first experience with an editor, here are five steps to help you get the most value out of your editorial experience. Step #1: Diagnose Your...

We’d like to begin this post by thanking everyone who submitted to our Microfiction Contest. It’s truly a pleasure reading your amazing work each month, and the amount of talent in this community impresses us constantly. We were especially impressed by the author of our winning entry, Kimberly Straub.Writing microfiction is tricky to navigate, so we’d love to dive deeper into what makes a great piece of microfiction great. Here...

It’s no secret that the first chapter is one of the most important chapters of your manuscript. In fact, many writers argue that it is the singular most important chapter, and we’re inclined to agree. After all, the first chapter is, for many readers, the deciding factor on whether or not to continue reading. For this reason, this chapter must contain a hook, the first steps for plot development, and...

Let’s think about art for a moment, shall we? Because after all, writing is an art. If I asked you or anybody else what it is they like about art, most of the time they’re going to say that it made them feel something. That’s one of the essences we all love about art: that it touches us in an emotional way. No matter what you’re writing or your level of expertise,...

Beginnings. They seem innocent, yet they possess the inexplicable ability to bring a writer to their knees. First lines haunt us late into the night until we spring up from bed only to greet the sun with the rhythmic pounding of the backspace key. The words come to us, but as soon as we see them on the page that little voice in our head (all writers know this voice)...

If you are like more than half of the people in this country, you probably have a job that takes up forty or more hours of your week (cue Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”). As a school teacher, I am currently taking on an abnormal amount of work. Busy would be an understatement to describe my current situation, and one thing keeps getting put on the backburner… my writing routine....

A synopsis is one of the trickiest parts of the landing-an-agent process. After sitting down to write your own synopsis, you may find yourself staring endlessly at the blank screen—especially if you’re anything like us—pondering how in the world you’re going to manage conveying your plot, character arcs, and themes within just a few pages. And to be honest, these musings are more than valid. Writing a synopsis is a...