Tag: fiction

  • Considering Alice Munro

    I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on a Munro chapter, in my Canadian women’s crime fiction book. The revisions since the spring have been rather more extensive than I’d anticipated. I thought I was writing about how Munro depicts violent crime, or suspicion that crimes have been committed, in a range of…

  • Solving Plot Problems

    Most of my focus has been on revising a novel draft that I’ve despaired of, these past two years, since I completed my 75,000 or so words. [Worse than feared: 104,665, which is, for my chosen genre, a baggy monster of a book, and unpublishable as a first novel.] I could see the plot and…

  • In Praise of Editors

    I’ve just completed comments/corrections in response to the best copyediting of my academic work that I’ve ever experienced (for a forthcoming MLA volume on teaching Margaret Atwood). It was a marked contrast to some past mediocre experiences, and one real disaster, when an entire book manuscript, including my chapter, was outsourced to a non-English-speaking country…