Nearly every Friday this summer the Write Now! Coach blog will feature brief book reviews by readers of this blog. To get us started, I found a wonderful chart on the Teach web site that you can use to choose your first book to read this summer. Enjoy! Via Teach.com and USC Rossier Online  Read More

Last February, Jessica Hagy published a brilliant visual story called, The Six Enemies of Greatness (and Happiness) (Forbes). In the introduction to her article, Hagy writes that these six factors, “can erode the grandest of plans and the noblest of intentions.” Wow—what six factors have the power to destroy both greatness and happiness? The enemies...Read More

I have spent a lot of time paging through various baby name books, looking for the perfect name for … the fictional characters I create. I’ve read that J. K. Rowling, author of the bestselling Harry Potter series, chose and created character names based on the meaning of root words in Latin, Greek, and French....Read More

Wednesday Writing Prompt: Boredom as Inspiration by Heather E. Schwartz I feel like I shouldn’t say this. But I’m going to anyway. I find myself really inspired by new writing ideas when I’m supposed to be paying attention to something else. This is most likely to happen during a class or at a lecture or...Read More

Dear Writers, This month’s Write Now! Mastermind class will be held Wednesday, May 23 at 12:00 noon CDT. My guest this week is my husband, Harold Eppley, who recently published his first novel, Ash Wednesday. You’ll hear about all of the hurdles he had to overcome to find a home for his book. And, if...Read More

See those spent dandelions? That’s my front yard. Every day I return home from the gym and wonder when someone will mow down those darn things. Then I remembered how my children used to delight in dandelions. At first,  they were simply a bright yellow reminder that the days were getting longer and warmer. Later,...Read More

Congratulations to the winners of the latest Write Now! Coach contest. The winner of the signed copy of Write-A-Thon is @greennovelist and the winner of Use Your Words by Kate Hopper is Ruth Gough Lolacano. Please send me your addresses, so I can mail your books! Today’s article is about how to create an online...Read More

Happy Friday, friends! I’ve been writing to make sense of my life for years. In the past ten years, I’ve been researching and writing about how writing can help us to heal physically and emotionally. Today, Kate Hopper writes about the therapeutic nature of writing creative nonfiction. If you’re a Milwaukee-area writer and want to...Read More

Last Saturday, I was out for a walk when I saw a man struggling with an empty poop bag. Somehow, the bag had ripped, and the man was trying to figure out how to make use of it. I happened to have two poop bags in my pocket, left over from a morning walk with...Read More

Today’s blog post is the first in a series of posts about Social Media for Writers. If you’d like to test the power of social media and enter to win a signed copy of Write-A-Thon, do the following things: +follow my blog +follow me on Twitter +tweet this post +link to this post on Facebook...Read More