A good writing conference energizes and inspires as well as providing new information, or at least old information in a fresh way.  Chicago Writers Conference, which wrapped up today, was a great writing conference.  Speakers were candid, generous and actually concerned, it seemed, with sharing information rather than gratifying their own egos.  While shattering dreams...Read More

Here’s the link to an interview with my literary agent, April Eberhardt, a real advocate for authors and a “literary change agent.” She’s the one who encouraged me to sign with She Writes Press for the publication of Warming Up this fall.Read More

Women writers among you have probably already heard about She Writes new self-publishing press. What makes it different–and this is an idea I worked on in a project dubbed Chicago Public Press that we had trouble getting funded–is the vetting of manuscripts. It’s self-publishing, but not for every manuscript, so if you read a She...Read More

For Mike, and everyone considering self-publishing:  My first novel, Courting Kathleen Hannigan, was a disappointment to literary agents.  I was a lawyer.  I was female.  I was from Chicago.  Unread, they’d anointed me the next Scottie Turow or at least Scottolini.  But I let them down.  I’d written a novel about the life of a...Read More