Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2026 i Writer's Digest

NAIMERA: Sapient Quest is the second book in Michael Ganzberger’s science-fiction series involving the creation of NAIMERAs: bioengineered, hybrid creatures created by a covert government organization to assist with special military operations. Not fully satisfied with the design of the first book in his series, Michael was interested in a more modern, cinematic direction that could be visually serialized on all covers. For his current novel, Sapient Quest, the main character is Dr. Miles Pierce, an extremely intelligent yet terminally ill astrophysicist. In efforts to combat an extraterrestrial invasion and circumvent Miles’ death, the doctor’s consciousness is transferred into a NAIMERA to infiltrate the invading forces and stop their release of a deadly biotoxin. As a basis for the cover, we wanted to provide an homage to the protagonist while…

If “write a book” is on your bucket list, you’re not alone. A ThriftBooks survey found more than half of Americans want to write a book—but only 15 percent actually start, and six percent get halfway through. You know why? Writer’s block keeps 33 percent from writing their books, and having no free time is why 26 percent of the 2,000-person survey do not write. Or—raise your hand if you’re one of the 16 percent who say perfectionism is what’s keeping you from your book? But never fear—turning your goal into reality is totally possible if you have the right tools and structure to guide you. I’m an author of two nonfiction books about productivity, and a novel too. I know what it takes to go from brainstorming to publishing.…

HOW TO FIND SUCCESS AS A POET I regularly receive questions related to writing and publishing advice. Some of the questions are unique and specific, while others are more general and repetitive. One that I tend to receive every couple of weeks is a variation of the following: “I’m new to poetry—I recently wrote my first poem—and I want to know how to make it as a poet. How do I find a good literary agent? Do I need one to get published by (insert big-name publisher here)?” This is a big and important question that is actually several questions I believe could be combined into two umbrella queries. One is, “How do I share my work with others?” The other is, “How do I find success as a poet?”…

Cinders of Yesterday; Sins of Survival (2026) (Fantasy, horror, and romance; Robot Dinosaur Press) WRITES FROM: My MacBook Pro (wherever I wind up) and my office. WHY SELF-PUBLISH? I had a bad experience with my original publisher and wound up getting my rights reverted. After a week of spiraling out about it, I decided to take the series indie and became a self-published author in the process. It was overwhelming at first, but I’ve mostly settled in since then. HAD YOU CONSIDERED TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING? I absolutely have. It was the original plan, and I queried Cinders of Yesterday before signing with my former agent and selling my book to my previous publisher. I’ve always wanted my books available in stores around the world and to have support as I write my books.…

Write what you know!” Everyone who has ever picked up a pen and tried their hand at words, ideas, and stories has heard that one. It’s something like the Second Commandment of writing. Between “Don’t forget to write your name,” and “Don’t steal others’ work.” But here’s the thing: It’s bullshit. In this attention economy? No one wants to read what you know. They want to read what you don’t know. What you’re still figuring out. What you’re still finding words for. What you’re piecing together into a story. What you’re excavating from the recesses of your family’s and peoples’ memories and bringing to life on the page. What traditions you are picking up, handing down, and adapting for the present. What story you alone can tell. That’s the thrill…

• Chapter 1: Jesse Stone, the protagonist • Chapter 2: Tom Carson, a victim • Chapter 3: Jesse Stone, the protagonist • Chapter 4: Hasty Hathaway, the antagonist • Chapter 5: Jesse Stone, the protagonist • Chapter 6: Jo-Jo Genest, the villain • Chapter 7: Jesse Stone, the protagonist • Chapter 8: Carole Genest, a victim; half-way through this chapter, the perspective changes to Jo-Jo, her ex-husband, for three sentences (Note: Jo-Jo interjects his voice into his ex-wife’s chapter, a perfect metaphor, given Jo-Jo’s behavior—a subplot tracks Jo-Jo’s efforts to interject himself into his ex-wife’s life.) • Chapter 9: Jesse Stone, the protagonist • Chapter 10: Jo-Jo Genest, the villain • Chapter 11: Jesse Stone, the protagonist • Chapter 12: Hasty Hathaway, the antagonist • Chapter 13: Jesse Stone, the…

• Pg. 2 “D”: Big shot doctor from Pelham has gone missing. Foul smell emanating from a Mercedes. • Pg. 2 “D”: Body is found in trunk of Mercedes parked four blocks from the 88th Precinct House. Multiple tickets slapped on car by police for Out-of-Date Registration. • Pg. 2 “T”: Matt gets a call that there had been another murder. He has to get the scoop. • Pg. 4 “R”: Detective Jack Reardon arrives at crime scene, Orchard Beach. This is Matt’s only way in. • Pg. 6 “T”: “Professor Brady,” Reardon’s nickname for Matt, due to Matt giving Reardon credit in a story about another case. This became Matt’s connect with the Police Department. • Pg. 9 “R”: Matt had to cancel plans to see his father. •…

Literary agents on the business of publishing. I magine an agent’s computer screen: 12 different manuscript tabs open, the cursor blinking, coffee going cold at the edge of the desk. Each file represents the same hope—that this will be the story that stops everything else. That’s the dream every writer pictures: An agent discovers your pages, feels the spark, and simply cannot put them down. We want that, too. We’re desperate for it. But it almost never happens that way. Most manuscripts lose me after a single chapter. This isn’t because authors can’t write. It’s because, when I weigh the demands of my day against what’s on the screen, nothing in the narrative convinces me to stay. That’s really what I’m looking for: a reason to keep turning pages. In…

Let me tell you about a dream I had recently. Wait, wait! Don’t turn the page just yet! I promise this dream doesn’t end with me showing up for class unprepared for a test or presentation. Or falling off a cliff. This dream starts with me standing in the middle of a dense forest, so dense that there’s no space for underbrush or any growth other than incredibly tall trees. Pines and oaks and maples so grand that their canopies merge, and it’s impossible for me to tell if it’s day or night or if there’s even a sky at all. There is no path, and the trees are so closely spaced that I cannot navigate between their trunks. I’m stuck, feel like I’m suffocating. Then a great wind sweeps…

In the three years I’ve been doing this Frontlist/Backlist column, I haven’t included writing advice books. But, for this issue at the start of a new year with a theme of finding the writing advice you need for your success, it seems fitting to include two writing guides that, while having overlapping ideas, are entirely different in tone. One may speak to you more than the other, and that’s exactly the point. Frontlist Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd (Knopf, writing inspiration/memoir, October 2025) SYNOPSIS: Like many successful writers, Sue Monk Kidd didn’t have a straight path to that success. As a child in the 1950s and ’60s, Kidd was brought up in Georgia during a time when girls were told they could be teachers, secretaries, nurses, and mothers,…

Writers, especially poets, will no longer get a free ride on the publishing gravy train. Effective immediately, the Government hereby announces targeted surcharges on the writing profession. All funds collected will support a new monthly newsletter: The Government Knows Best. The following fees may unpredictably change without notice. Or logic. PUNCTUATION TARIFFS OXFORD COMMA: Triple surcharge for this and other woke punctuation. Waived for writers in the U.K. or Connecticut. ALL CAPS: Permissible but with a 10% CAP FEE. ELLIPSES: Fee per dot. Limited to three ellipses per 1,500 words; exceeding this triggers the Writing Luxury Tax. EXCLAMATION POINTS: Effective immediately! A 15% tariff!! Always!!! GENRES ROMANCE: Fee imposed if male love interest is Canadian or Mexican. Double, if he is mounting a horse. Triple, if shirtless. SELF-HELP: A 25%…

Welcome to a new year of writing! The January/February issue is always one of my favorites because it’s filled with hope and anticipation of the possibilities that the year might bring. Perhaps it’s a long-awaited answer on the short story or poem you submitted. Maybe this is the year you’ll get a literary agent. It could be that you plan to hit “publish” on your first self-published novel. Or, maybe you’ll make this the year you finally finish a full draft of the project you’ve been tossing around in your mind for far too long and keep re-outlining because you keep telling yourself that counts as writing when what you should really be doing is actual drafting … not that that’s something I know anything about. No matter what you…

If punctuation were a toolbox, quotation marks would be the small but versatile multitool. They shape tone, highlight terms, and even reflect cultural quirks. These marks might seem simple; their influence is truly anything but. DIALOGUE DONE RIGHT Quotation marks connect readers with characters’ voices. But formatting them can trip up even seasoned writers. Here are some best practices: PLACEMENT OF PUNCTUATION: In American English, commas and periods go inside the quotation marks: “I can’t believe it,” Jane said. “I can’t believe it.” In British English, punctuation placement varies, often depending on whether it’s part of the quoted material: “I can’t believe it”, Jane said. ATTRIBUTION TAGS: Keep attribution simple to let dialogue shine: “We should leave,” the treasure hunter said. Avoid overloading tags with unnecessary adverbs: “We should leave,” the…

Catherine Jones (she/her) graduated from Kenyon College in 2022 with a degree in film and English and a concentration in creative writing. She joined Union Literary in 2023 and became an agent in 2025. She’s also an international literary scout, having read for The Kenyon Review and Sweet literary magazine, and is currently working part-time with Edmison/Harper Literary Scouting. “Being a literary scout is such a blessing because you read so many fantastic books at a breakneck pace and get to know the ins and outs of each publisher and agency,” she says. “It’s an industry masterclass.” Jones’ dream project is a feminist near-future mermaid cli-fi (climate fiction). As an agent, she leans into advice from her boss, Sally Wofford-Girand, who told her that trends come and go, and not…

S. A. Cosby’s short story (analyzed above from a POV perspective) also uses a complex, extended metaphor. Here is an excerpt from the first paragraph: “Jail is Hell on earth. And just like Hell it’s filled with lost souls who have become demons. If you get a chance to find a way out of that Tartarus, you take it. Even if it’s just to go see your mama laid out at the funeral home. You cherish those few hours like you’re Persephone.” Notice the progression: 1. A declarative sentence setting the metaphor in motion. Cosby doesn’t say jail is like hell on earth; he’s saying it is hell on earth. 2. A statement adding specificity: “lost souls” becoming “demons.” 3. A continuation of the metaphor, expanding on a specific, relevant…

Much like Lila Macapagal, protagonist of the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series, author Mia P. Manansala has had a very busy few years. Since her first novel (and first book in the series), Arsenic and Adobo, was published in 2021, Manansala has written and published five additional books in the series, released her first YA novel, and written a second, forthcoming YA novel. And like her protagonist, whose life changes dramatically over the course of the cozy mysteries, Manansala’s own life has changed significantly. Before she was published, Manansala says, “I was an English language instructor, so I taught English as a foreign language at a for-profit language school. I got laid off in 2020 for obvious reasons. I found out I was getting laid off the same day I…

The art and craft of writing nonfiction. We write in an era of cancel culture and libel lawsuits. Merely changing the names of real people is no longer sufficient to protect them or ourselves. When I wrote my nonfiction book, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms, I had to disguise the identities of 30 therapy clients and family members. The stakes were high: One mistake could have ended my career as a psychotherapist and damaged my family relationships. Still, I refused to sacrifice the authenticity of my story. Instead, I used intentional and strategic methods of concealment. You can use similar tactics to protect others and yourself while preserving the truth. WHY DISGUISE? First, you must clarify why you’re concealing identities in your story. Your…

JANE K. CLELAND (JaneCleland.com) has written 14 novels in the multiple award-winning Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series. The series was just optioned for TV/film development. Jane’s newest book on the craft of writing, Beat the Bots: A Writer’s Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Age of AI, uses science-based techniques to show how to boost creativity. Jane’s other nonfiction books, Mastering Suspense, Structure & Plot and Mastering Plot Twists, both won the Agatha Award. AMANDA ANN GREGORY, LCPC (AmandaAnnGregory.com), is a trauma psychotherapist renowned for her work in complex trauma recovery, notably as the author of You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. With a keen focus on the specific needs of trauma survivors, Gregory’s expertise spans over 20 years in clinical practice. She has been…

If you’re an independent (selfpublished) author, then you likely are familiar with the crippling moments of insecurity that come with self-publishing. Here are a few examples of what I am talking about: • After weeks of brainstorming, you select a title for your book. Is it the “right” one? More than half the people you polled (a group of 50 newsletter subscribers) thought so, but can you be confident this is the title that will attract readers to your book? All you know without a doubt is that the book must have a title, and you can’t begin to launch until it does, so time is of the essence. (This applies to the cover art as well.) • You’re filling out metadata forms, and you come to the part about…

DEAR SIMON, When you are creating a character, do they come to you fully formed, or do they develop over the course of the book? Also, do your characters ever do something that you’re morally opposed to? How do you handle that? —Carrie S. in Wisconsin Dear Carrie, What interesting and thoughtful questions. I often feel the urge to begin a story or a novel because of an emotional moment I experience witnessing someone on the subway, in a shop, at a dinner, or even in a dream or a memory. I leave the encounter with great energy for writing, though never know where the story will go. All I have to do is sit down and write. If I wait too long, the feeling weakens over the course of…

Senaa Ahmad The Age of Calamities (Short speculative fiction, January, Henry Holt & Co.) “A genre-bending story collection where historical figures are yanked into the modern day, turned into ghosts, embroiled in mysteries, and otherwise taken out of their familiar environments.” WRITES FROM: Toronto. PRE-CALAMITIES: I thought I was working on my first collection, a mashup of genre and diaspora fiction, featuring teenage cults, ghosts who live in telephone wires, and hijabi whiz kids … when the idea for The Age of Calamities crept into my head and wouldn’t go away. TIME FRAME: I wrote the stories on and off between 2018 and 2023, including four stories that never made it into the collection. Some, like “Choose Your Own Apocalypse,” took the entire five-year span to write, with big blocks…

Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt kept my undivided attention for 430 pages. The tale follows a yeoman archer from England named Nicholas Hook. Twists, reversals, and moments of heightened danger occur at every turn. I have listed them in chronological order (annotated as “T,” for twist; “R,” for reversal; and “D,” for heightened danger). • Pg. 8 “D”: Hook tries to settle a family feud by murdering a rival. He fails. His Lord finds out and sends him south to join the war. • Pg. 27 “R”: Hook saves a woman from being raped by a priest (Sir Martin). He punches the priest, which results in a death-sentence for Hook. A sergeant helps Hook escape as an outlaw. • Pg. 61 “D”: Battle of Soissons begins (siege). • Pg. 80 “R”: Soissons…

For as much as I love the process of writing (and I do), I also adore learning how other writers handle their business—from the creative process itself to how they promote themselves and their writing. After all, who better to study than other writers who are finding success, right? And so, I sifted through scores of author interviews I’ve conducted over the years and assembled the following habit list of successful writers. READ VORACIOUSLY All writers write, but most truly successful writers read. A lot. “Read as much as you can and read the very best books you can find,” advises Philippa Gregory, awardwinning author of Boleyn Traitor. “I reread the classics constantly. Austen, E. M. Forster, Henry James—it’s a long list—but they are all masterclasses in storytelling and language,…

Writing and publishing advice for picture books, middle-grade, and young adult storytelling. When Dr. Jewell Parker Rhodes originally published her middlegrade novel Ghost Boys in 2018, she knew then it would make for a great graphic novel. “When I was a little girl, I couldn’t afford books,” she says. “So, I used to turn in pop bottles, like the glass bottles, and I would take my nickels and buy comic books. For me as a child of poverty, the value of the comic book, which I think is a cousin to the graphic novel, was in my DNA. I never doubted that it could become something just as valuable.” Rhodes began her writing career writing for adults. “I’m glad actually that I started out writing for adults,” she says, “because…

FLORIDA GET AWAY TO WRITE–FLORIDA, presented by Murphy Writing of Stockton University. March 9–14, 2026 writing retreat at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach. Escape the cold to write in Florida. Spend an inspiring week working on your poetry or prose. Enjoy plentiful writing time, insightful feedback, homemade meals, and time to relax. Beginning and experienced writers welcome. Register early and save: Stockton.edu/murphywriting. Contact: Murphy Writing of Stockton University Ph: 609/626-3594 murphywriting@stockton.edu Stockton.edu/murphywriting PENNSYLVANIA THE WRITE STUFF WRITERS CONFERENCE, March 12–14, Center Valley, Pa. Presented by the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group. Keynote: Kristin Bair. Thursday: morning—strong openings; afternoon—POV. Friday: morning—author brand and platform; afternoon—publishing. Saturday: 14 sessions (including creative nonfiction, world-building; query letters, synopses, writing for children, humor, and more). Agent/editor appointments! Attendees have access to session…