When I retired from teaching I decided to try my hand at writing children’s picture books. Since my retired husband and I had more time available to us, we decided to spend the summer in Minnesota. This was a long way from our home in Arizona in more ways than 2,000 miles. We traded a dry hot desert for humid lake country, rattlesnakes for giant mosquitos, and coyotes for ducks. But the ducks that really caught my attention weren’t really ducks, they were gorgeous waterfowl known as Common Loons and Trumpeter Swans.

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Today I’m here to talk about finding balance while juggling on a unicycle. I’m here as a person with many roles. Many pieces of my identity. Many balls to juggle while riding forward in life, hopefully without falling over. First and foremost, I’m a mom. I have a cheeky, intelligent, creative four-and-a-half-year-old daughter and a curious, silly, cuddly two-year-old son. I’ve been working full-time as a school psychologist for twelve years, mostly in elementary schools. I’m also a traditionally published Young Adult author.

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Today I want to talk about my favorite part of writing—the setting, and how I use setting in my upcoming YA Southern mystery, The Existence of Bea Pearl, out this Fall from Owl Hollow Press. To me, setting is a character unto itself. It drives the tone and tension of the story just as much as the walking, talking characters. When I’m brainstorming a shiny new idea, it’s usually the first thing that comes to me. Then the characters, and after much angst and gnashing of teeth, the plot.

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Online reviews from your audience can be a source of anxiety, no matter your level of professional experience. As a writer, you pour your heart onto the page, and wait for the judgement to roll in. You hope your readers enjoy that scene on page 97 that makes you giggle every time you read it, or hope they stay up until three in the morning because they can’t wait to find out how things end.

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Queen sang it best when they belted about being free, but sometimes this is a lesson many writers (including yours truly) can forget. In June 2017, I entered the Mountainview MFA fiction program with the knowledge of what I wanted to write for my thesis. The final submitted thesis, due in two years, would have to sit between 25,000 and 75,000 words, and I planned on the latter. I had lit my own proverbial fire under my own butt.

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Instagram has over a billion monthly active users, which makes the platform an excellent place to increase your reach. But you can’t just post a photo and expect to grow your following. You need to know the top Instagram writing tips.

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Kayla King is a graduate of the Mountainview MFA. She is the author of These Are the Women We Write About, a micro-collection of poetry published by The Poetry Annals. Her short story, “In the Valley of Stars,” is included in Mistletoe & Magic: A YA Books Central Holiday Anthology. Kayla's fiction and poetry has been published by or is forthcoming from Plath Poetry Project, Dear Damsels, Figroot Press, Ink In Thirds Magazine, Firewords Magazine, Sobotka Literary Magazine, and Twelve Winters Press, among others. You can follow Kayla’s writing journey over at her website: kaylakingbooks.com or her twitterings @KaylaMKing. 

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Bookworms have a superpower: they can read pretty much anywhere. This includes the most unexpected positions and places, but they neither notice nor do they care, as their love for books allows them to overcome any and every obstacle. We’ve prepared a list of the most magnificent (and a few unexpected) places you can read a book:

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Reading can save people from horrible and dark things or just the insanity of reality. The increase in books being manufactured could be a positive and negative thing. More books mean new readers which mean a more relaxed and less technology dependent community. However, many agree that books are the reason why we are losing trees and clean oxygen and causing global climate change through the need for more paper.

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I grew to love and loathe my phone, not for its size or price or even the tendency for its software to crash, but because of all the ‘information’ I could access.  The ability to scan thousands of headlines and taglines until your eyes numb, only to regret wasting that half-hour when you could’ve been working or reading a book.  A few months ago I resolved to back away from social media. I deleted the apps and experimented with a “shut-off” period every day in which I didn’t touch my phone for any reason.  It lasted three days. Until the first time my wife leaned over on the couch, “Hey, look at this.” I was wholly off the bandwagon in seconds, facedown in the gutter getting trampled by the 24-hour newsfeed.

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If you've had that book or blog post in the back of your mind for quite awhile, but have yet to see it through to publication, maybe now is the time to get it into print.  Sometimes great ideas stay stuck in people's hearts and heads because they aren't sure how to organize it all.  I hope I can help you when that happens. I love talking about writing.  I'm a reading/writing specialist and have published two children's books.  Writing is something that I'm passionate about helping people with.  I hope that this article helps you to get your writing ideas published sooner than later.

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Marjorie Lewis is a writer, journalist and sports enthusiast. Her debut novel When The Men Were Gone is based on a true story set during World War II. Here's a story from her about how she discovered her new passion.

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Writing can be challenging when we get stuck. Story Cubes are a great way to get inspiration and continue our story. Sometimes games can help us develop characters, build worlds, and come up with incredible battles. These cubes are similar to dice. However, they have simple images printed instead of numbers. The target of the game is to create a story using the cubes as raw material.

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The first time I was able to write with any kind of regularity was my second semester of college. Before, I’d either had only the time to write or the ideas for what to write, never both. That semester, I had a looser class schedule and a story idea that wouldn’t let me ignore it. I stole moments to write it, not really keeping to a strict schedule, but finishing a novel all the same. It wasn’t until my second book, a year later, that I got my act together. I scheduled my classes around my best writing times, electing to keep my mornings free and vowing to get at least 2000 words done before noon.

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My journey within the query trenches began July 31, 2017, and I’m still there after six months. I’ve received one full manuscript request from an agent who later passed on the work. I’ve endured twenty rejections, but my partial manuscript is currently under consideration. During this time in the trenches, I have done my best to not only survive but thrive. And I’m hoping you can do the same with these ten tips and tricks to surviving the query trenches!

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 The entire writing, rewriting, editing, revising, polishing, publishing process is a walk in the park, except you’re not walking. You’re running uphill in ten feet of snow with rabid dogs chasing you. 

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