This is a blog about writing from the words you can’t get out to the bits you polish and publish.
Welcome to the slush pile of my life…
From the mailbag: When does your play need an editor & when should you copyright?
Hi Hillary, I’m an author and I’ve worked with editors/publishers with my book. I understand that process but as a new playwright, I’m not sure how to go about getting my 3 plays critiqued, edited and proofread. I’m an indie author and self publish but I’m not sure about self-publishing my 3 plays. I’ve researched publishing houses. Does publishing houses typically do editing services prior to publishing plays if accepted by them? Also, would you submit your scripts to the U.S. Copyright office prior to a...
read moreBreak into YA writing by starting with the stage before the page
If you’re a YA writer having trouble breaking in, you might be better off getting started with writing YA plays first. I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for ages but then this question came in from the mailbag which gave me the perfect opportunity to discuss it. I came across your website because I am just getting into playwriting, in addition to plugging along in writing YA fiction. Right now, I do have a finished one-act play. I have no idea what to do with it other than workshop it with the theatre group I’m in...
read moreKanban for writers: organize book releases, revisions & more with project management boards
Kanban for Writers My writing life is a many headed beast. I write fiction, non-fiction, freelance articles, stage plays and more under a variety of pen names. I’m always looking for better ways to prioritize and manage all these different project so I’m not running around like the proverbial headless chicken. When I learned about the Kanban system of project management, I was incredibly excited because I realized it was perfectly adaptable to the writing life (and specifically my genre hopping, over-booked, multi-projects in...
read moreCamp NaNoWriMo July 2018 debrief
I went into Camp NaNoWriMo’s July session with low expectations. My only word count goal was to try to hit 50,000 words as that would make it my highest word count month for this laid back, low goal year and be good practice for NaNoWriMo proper. As for what I was going to write, my focus was to try to write a bunch of blog posts I’d been meaning to do for a while and then spend the rest of the month writing down random stories from my two decades of selling online, a project I’ve nicknamed my eBay memoirs. And I did manage...
read moreA Writer’s Guide to Resistance: how to keep writing in a world gone mad
No, it’s not just you. It is really freaking hard to write right now. The world has gone mad, everything is terrible and all that continuous fear and rage and stress makes it really hard to focus on anything, much less fiction. Creatives, like writers, are particularly hit by this because that same empathy that makes us able to get into the skin of a character or the hearts of our readers makes digesting everything happening right now especially hard. Empathy is a very good thing, especially when it comes to survival and getting along...
read moreNew Hosting!
If you noticed the site being a bit wonky and a lot, um, down the last week, that’s because I finally switched web hosts, a thing I have been meaning to do for over a decade. I had been with GoDaddy in one form or another since 2005 and while there were things I liked about them, there was a growing list of things I didn’t. Add to this that my new host, SiteGround (referral link because I’m happy to recommend them), offered me a bunch of cool extras for a faster site and less money than I was paying GoDaddy so I finally...
read moreWhat I’m writing for Camp NaNoWriMo’s 2018 July Session
You know what the problem is with becoming organized and efficient? I really miss being able to write about whatever random thing I felt like it. Sure, I wasn’t getting anything accomplished that way and I wasn’t moving towards my goals effectively in a big picture sense but, man, I felt free! If I wanted to write a random blog post about how my house is being taken over by tiny ants to the point that I FOUND SOME IN THE BABY’S POOPY DIAPER FOR FARK’S SAKE or spend the day obsessively writing the bio for a pen name I...
read moreQ2 Spring 2018: Planting the seeds for future growth
Spring took its sweet time getting here but when it finally did battle its way past all the snow it was nice… for the few days it was here before giving way to the sweltering hot summer-like temperatures… before it went back to a little chilly and now it’s hot again? Go home, Mother Nature. You’re drunk. But just like Spring is a season of new beginnings and growth and, most of all, change, this was an unusual quarter of writing for me. Let’s just get down to it… March Total Words Written This Month 34,451...
read moreQ1 2018: Winter Writing Wrap-up
This year, I decided to start doing my writing debriefs quarterly. Partly because I just don’t have time anymore to take the incoherent screeds from my private writing journal and make them pretty enough to post every month, partly because it better reflects the amount of work I’m doing (ie, this year I’m only doing about as much work in three months as I used to do in one). But since my writing year starts in December, that divides the year up nicely by season into Q1 Winter (December, January, February), Q2 Spring (March,...
read moreI’m in the market for a new desk lamp. Preferable one that doesn’t randomly burst into flame.
I’ve been using the same desk lamp since middle school. It’s the world’s most generic black desk lamp with little cubbies on the bottom for paper clips and mouse skulls or whatever people keep in there. I’ve used it this long because it’s perfectly serviceable apart from the fact that the shade part is made from some kind of cardboardish wood that tends to burst into flame if the bulb is on too long. (I’m not joking. There are actual scorch marks on the inside and a chunk is missing from an earlier...
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Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
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