Note: From time to time on #thiswritinglife I will post reviews of books about the building blocks of our craft. If on the way to looking up “occurrence” for the seventy-third time to see if it’s two c’s or two r’s (both) and an “e” or and “a” (an e) and get sidetracked first by osmometry,…
In 2009 I was asked to answer the Book Brahmins Questionnaire on Shelf Awareness. Never hard to get me talking about books I love, so I did, and here are their questions and my answers, lightly edited. On your nightstand now: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. I was raised in…
The M.J. Murdock Trust, a great Friend of Storyknife, sent a film crew up to Alaska last year (2021) to talk to the people involved in projects they have funded here. An aside on the Murdock Trust–it was started by a guy who sold Piper airplanes, and the Trust donates to projects in the states…
If I had a nickel for every time somebody said to me, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” I’d be a rich woman and I’d never have to write another word. But seriously, folks. The two questions I am always asked are, 1, how to get published, and 2, how to get an agent.…
[From an interview with David Allen Binder, 2012 or thereabouts.] What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? To write every day. Even if it’s only a sentence a day, that is one more sentence than you had the day before. By the end of the month…
I am always acutely aware that we grow writers from the ground up. I wouldn’t be a writer today if my mother had not hauled me at age eight up the ladder from the Celtic to the dock and marched me down the boardwalk to the Seldovia Public Library, where she introduced me to my…
[for the Poisoned Pen Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, July 13, 2012] Sometimes research is easy. When I lived in Anchorage my house was right under the traffic pattern to the seaplane base of Lake Hood. One day my father was helping me with something in my back yard and a Cessna 206…
Remember earlier in #thiswritinglife I enjoined the writers among you to never pass up an opportunity to stretch your writing muscle. And then Byron Birdsall got in touch to ask me to write a foreword to his collection of black-and-white drawings called Byron Birdsall’s Alaska. Never pass up an opportunity to stretch your writing muscle.…
[ITW interview with Gwen Florio, upon the publication of Less Than a Treason in 2017. Edited.] You are best known for your twenty-book series featuring Kate Shugak, an Aleut private investigator who lives in a fictional park in Alaska (we’ll get to the other three series in a bit). Let me repeat that: twenty books…
I finished the first draft of the third Eye of Isis novel last week, and under strict instructions from the August writers in residence at Storyknife I am to take a week off. Relax. Take a walk on the beach. Drink a bottle of wine with friends. Read books instead of writing them. If only.…
