By Scott D. Parker Failure sucks, but failure isn't all bad. After rehearsal on Thursday night, I came back home (with McDonald's fo...

By Scott D. Parker (This is a rerun, originally written in 2022, but this is a perennial reminder that Resistance is always present and we n...

by Scott D. Parker It is rare that we constantly sustain the excitement of what we do. We writers can love the writing process, but after, s...

By Scott D. Parker For those of us with a day job that is not fiction writing, we have to choose to carve out time in our day to write our s...

By Scott D. Parker Three. I want you to keep that number in mind as you read this post. (And yes, it’s a magical number…) Last week I posed ...

by Scott D. Parker Words, pages, or scenes? What is the best way to measure progress when writing a novel? When I wrote my first novel,...

by Scott D. Parker She had me with five words: The Thin Man in space. Still, I hadn’t read the book yet so I honestly waffled over whether o...

By Scott D. Parker What keeps you going? What keeps you writing? Why bother publishing? I’ve had numerous thoughts on this subject throughou...

By Scott D. Parker I watched “Clerks III” on Thursday, and it’s a great example of a storyteller allowing his characters to age, grow, and m...

by Scott D. Parker Remember back on Memorial Day when I wrote a post about The Great Summer Writing Season? I said that in the 97 days betw...

By Scott D. Parker Where has this book been all my writing life? Well, right in front of me, the entire time. I’ve known about Steven Pressf...

You finished your book. You even revised it a few times. A beta reader (or ten) gave you notes, so you revised it two more times for good me...

There's that bit of writing advice: write what scares you. It's nothing new and honestly, the advice is solid, but I think writers o...

by Scott D. Parker The NFL season kicked off on Thursday of this week, but I was already prepared because of Peter King. For many years now,...

Writers out there know the feeling of finishing the first draft. A sense of exhilaration. You did a thing! A pretty remarkable thing at that...

This week's rant will 100% NOT be about selling your books. Sorry, we all know the best way to do that is to spam strangers via DM. That...

by Scott D. Parker How do you keep going?  On anything.  If you're a runner, you lace up the shoes, don your favorite running clothes, m...

A writer always writes. That's a crock of shit.  I'm a big fan of taking breaks. It's something I learned to do when I got into ...

by Scott D. Parker Here in the US, every new president is judged by what he does in his first one hundred days. It harkens back to 1933 when...

by Scott D. Parker How often do you restart a novel you’ve set aside? I am an obsessive saver of things when it comes to my writing. I’ve go...