The offer arrives, and with it forty pages of clauses. Here are the sections that matter, in the order a first-time author should read them.
Six weeks of bookshops, festival green rooms and regional trains, and what a touring writer actually learns from reading the same forty pages out loud.
Reading two hundred sources for a historical novel is easy. Knowing which four sentences to use is the actual job.
A first draft is a rumor about a novel. Here is the structural pass I run before I let myself fix a single sentence.
Maps, menus and the price of bread — the unglamorous machinery that makes an invented place feel like somewhere you could catch a cold.
A quiet novel about archivists and a drowned village that does more with silence than most books manage with spectacle. Ten specific reasons to pick it up.
Inheritance, borders and the uses of forgetting — a slow look at the three ideas holding up a book that pretends to be about a forest.
Six people, four months and roughly two hundred rejected versions stand behind the image on the front of a novel. Here is how the cover of The Dragon's Embrace was made.
Elena Marsh spent nine years on a book that was supposed to take two. Here is what happened in between, told without the flattering edits.
