In Tune: Writing about Music in Fiction! 🎶

I’m crafting some exciting new projects for 2024, including a delightful 4-week online writing class at WOW! for February.

Introducing: IN TUNE: Writing About Music in Fiction!

If you’re looking to treat yourself to some writing motivation or looking for the perfect holiday or birthday gift for the writer in your life, look no further! This class will rock! 🤩🎸🥁

Course description:

“Fiction is filled with references to music: from high-school dances and music-school students, singers, music teachers and lessons, garage bands and musical instruments to records, rock concerts and folk/indie festivals and coffee-house performances, opera and musical-theatre performances, and so much more. Many of us spend our happiest hours with music in the forefront or background of our lives as soundtrack. There’s a type of music-inspired prose for as many musical genres as you enjoy.

Whether you’re writing a scene or story about a music practice, a novel with a musician or music fan as a protagonist, or just want to know more about how musical fiction works and/or add musical references, vivid characterizations of vocal performance, or music-centered scenes or references to your writing, this course will explore how music culture, sound, setting, POV, and more are portrayed within fiction to enhance and inspire your own rhythmic, compelling prose. Knowing how to read musical notes isn’t required for this class—just the desire and sincere appreciation for both music and literature and to add another tool to your literary toolkit.

Students will choose one novel with a musical plot to read independently, and the instructor will provide excerpts from music novels as well as handouts and a weekly writing assignment to get the muse melodically flowing! Join us for this new course that’s sure to strike a chord.”

To the great joy of writing and music! Sign-ups open now! Clickety-click: IN TUNE: Writing About Music in Fiction!

New Month, New Projects Popping ⏲️

Hello, September!

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately: how we organize it, how we anticipate or dread it, how we save it through the things we make and the things we share, how it is ever-malleable—both jet-speed propulsion and gelatin slow and everything in-between.

So, I made this thematic pen-and-ink drawing. Writing the interconnected and interrupted “ticks” was relaxing. There’s something very meditative about making something by hand, even something imperfect, as this doodle most certainly is. 😁

Also, my new class about writing historical fiction and time-travel stories, Leaping Worlds, is accepting registrations and will start Friday, September 30th. Can’t wait! Clicky above for more deets. I’d love to work with you and a friend. 📝

Thoreau Time!🌻

If it’s mid-August already, then that means my mind is happily scampering towards thoughts of crisp mornings, crunchy and colorful leaves, and my fall classes.

This fall, I’ll teach a new online class I’ve created, Leaping Worlds—Writing Historical Fiction and Time-Travel Stories. The course starts Sept. 30th and runs for five weeks. Now open for registration at Women on Writing!

Anticipating autumn also makes me start to think about Thoreau, Emerson, and the Transcendentalist writers that my high-school students always used to read from the Norton’s Anthology of American Literature every fall semester during my first years of teaching.

Thoreau in particular always offers up golden nuggets of observation and thought that shimmer in my mind. I notice something different each time I read excerpts of his work, which is one of the pleasures of reading literature more than once and over time.

I made some quote memes recently to share a few of his quotes that resonated during my latest literary perusal. Enjoy!

Announcing: Leaping Worlds! A New Writing Class

For a long time, I’ve wanted to teach a class about writing historical fiction as well as stories with time-travel elements. Le voila! Wish granted. In this new class through Women on Writing, I get to explore both topics with writers interested in either or both types of fiction. It’s going to be a blast.🚀 Break out your keyboards and your time machines!

Starts September 30th online; sign up today to reserve your spot.

More details at: Leaping Worlds—Writing Historical Fiction and Time-Travel Stories