It was a dream, not a nightmare. She hadn’t been frightened, but she needed to know who had been with her and why she had been running and where she was going. The specter was a benevolent presence; there had been some other reason she was racing through that maze. But the details faded too quickly for her to grasp them.

Novel Bites is a series of short stories from the perspective of secondary characters in my novels. This one was posted in my substack newsletter before I started doing audio there and linking them to read here. Jack is Alice's hippie father in the novella Alice. He's talking to us about his own history here. When I got home from ‘Nam, all I wanted to do was forget all of it and find something good. My high school sweetheart had gotten knocked up and married while I was slogg

Updated 1/12/2026 Sometimes I review books that help writers with their craft or self-publishers with their business, but I’ve been judging books for Independent Publishers of New England the last few years and I’d like to review indie books readers might never find. I have received a pile of requests, including some from people with traditional but small publishers. I'm going to review indies and those working with hybrid presses first, but then I'll read the books from trad

If you subscribe (for free) at https://sherimcguinn.substack.com/ it gets delivered to your inbox one time per week and I know right away how many people are opening it = positive reinforcement = good. I'll be posting there each week instead of here. The biggest difference is that the substack newsletter is going to be geared for writers AND readers every week. Blog posts here were sometimes just a review of a book, or a review with notes for writers, or just for writers, or

A Graphic Novel I'm a year behind in writing book reviews. Many of the books I read were popular and have no need for my support, so I'll just mention a few I really enjoyed. Derf Backderf's Kent State - the first graphic novel I've read! Yes, I read comic books as a kid. Graphic novels, at least this one, go WAY past that. He did a phenomenal amount of research and presented the events from multiple points of view. This was a key event in my lifetime. I'm shocked at the youn

Well, I sm typing leftie because I broke my right clavicle when the gravel got me coming down a small slope. Ouch. Fortunately, shoulder's fine and I was able to walk. Pain is minimal - I'll take a broken bone over soft tissue injury any day. But I am taking it easy for a week or two, let the healing begin. Copyright Sheri McGuinn

While I advocate participating in a critique group to test your writing and get constructive feedback, there are down sides of critique.

There's no iron-clad rule saying what comes first when you are writing. I throw my characters into a situation and see how they deal with it

Free webinars may be a sales pitch - that doesn't mean they're useless. Webinars by Carla King and Rob Eagar discussed with resource links.

Every character has a bit of the writer in there - even villains. Sometimes a character develops in unexpected ways and takes over the story

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King says "Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's."

Are you serious about writing if you're not writing daily?... I am a project-based worker. I can maintain a regular writing routine for a

Let's look at King's Toolbox recommendations. The tool used most often goes on top: Vocabulary... Usually the first word... is the best one.

In On Writing, Stephen King says "Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." We develop our ear for language through reading.

As a young child, I routinely took home a foot-high stack of library books, read them, and returned for a new stack the next week. I was writing A+ stories long before a teacher showed us how to diagram a sentence. I still read and write - but I don't diagram sentences. I write according to the sound, the flow, the feel of the words. If a fragment works better than a grammatically correct sentence, I use the fragment. I use paragraph breaks the same way - according to what fi

The next few blogs, I'm going to pull out quotes from Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and talk about them a bit.

As writers, we listen to understand - whether it's an interview for an article or just eavesdropping on an interesting conversation

Memory may be fact or fiction. This is one of the reasons it's so important to verify facts from multiple sources when writing non-fiction.

Whether or no that publisher takes the book, their deadline got me to pull it together - a satisfying end to 2023.

Amongst other things in my email this morning was a link to a short story contest that sounded interesting.... reading the rules came first.

To help plan next year, I'm going to spend the next week focusing on one of the principles of Kwanza each day... Baby steps count.

Looking back, I accidentally pulled my first all-nighter in fifth grade. When my parents went to bed, I told them I just had to copy my essay one more time - yes, I am a dinosaur who had to write my essays in cursive and hand-draw any illustrations. I kept finishing, seeing a small error or drawing I could do better, and redoing the whole paper, until I heard my father's alarm clock go off. I still have that essay - it looks childish next to what kids can produce today with c

Always write for your audience. I write social histories for sentence mitigation attorneys. My audience is the judge.

Write for your audience: Age. Not every person of a given age is identical, but knowing the age of your audience gives you a starting point.