Stephanie Golden

Where does writing come from? (part 1)

I’ve been mulling over some journal entries by Flannery O’Connor, written in 1946–47, when she was twenty-one and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The entries show her struggling with the tension between her ambition to be a successful writer and her desire, as a devout Catholic, to think about God “all the time.” You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. … what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it[…]

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Tech warrior II: online sample

Amazon is amazing. They don’t miss a beat. I just discovered that I can post a link to an online free sample of Slaying the Mermaid that people can read in their browser—no special software needed. You can read the entire first chapter; just scroll past the title and copyright pages.  Makes me feel like a techie. All you other writers, take note. Much opportunity for publicizing your ebook via the KindleBoards forums (where I learned about this online sample link). I just finished figuring out the html code for including both book cover and a tag line in my[…]

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Reborn from the ashes

Writing Craft & Practice has a new look, and a new life. I was hacked—some enterprising soul inserted stealth links to sellers of Viagra and Adderall at the bottoms of my pages, and Google didn’t approve. No use trying to clean it up since I had to update my software anyway. So all but a few of the old posts are gone (though all are still up on Facebook). And the focus has changed slightly, as my preoccupations shifted to include more ways that the inspirational aspect of writing intersects with skill and experience.

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