Category: Writing


  • I’m sitting at the picnic table in my parents’ kitchen, the mess of art projects and nubbins of flowers picked by siblings and half-finished notebooks and Costco packs of food surround me. Walking down the hill this morning to make coffee cake before they left for church, I had to stop and soak in the…

  • For the last year, I’ve been sleeping on couches, borrowed mattresses, and at last, my own thin IKEA futon thrown down on the floor. I have lived out of a suitcase since last August. This last week I spent wound tight, my attention turned so intensely inward that I left threads hanging to tangle in…

  • On Friday, as many of you may have learned by now, the YA internet world blew up, and this article by Ruth Graham is why. Here’s the crux of her argument: …a whopping 28 percent of all YA sales—are between ages 30 and 44. That’s my demographic, which might be why I wasn’t surprised to hear this…

  • “Maybe I’ll just set it in a small college and then get my editor to help me change everything to high school details after the manuscript gets accepted.” “I think I should Snapchat my sister who is actually in high school and see if that gives me more inspiration.” “These problems are pretty universal, right?”…

  • UPDATE Everything crashed again, sorry, sorry, etc. We had a SNAFU with servers and switching and WordPress accounts and the fastest way to get this up and running again was to jump the gun on switching Wine & Marble to a domain of my own name, etc. It got complicated, Kiery King is a web…

  • Starting The YA Wallpaper with Gretchen has been a lot of fun. We’re just getting going and I think we’re doing something different from what anyone else is doing when they engage the genre. We’re taking it on its own terms: YA is a serious genre taking on serious issues and expects more of its readers…

  • I’m going to be giving the Immodesty Rail series a rest for now and turn to something else that’s been making me excited lately. Sometimes I rant about books on Twitter. Sometimes I write stupid posts about books that annoy me. And I always I grumble about bad writing with my inner feminist curmudgeon. But…

  • I’ve been waiting for this book to come out for months. It finally showed up on my doorstep on Friday (it releases tomorrow, but I got lucky and got an ARC) and I gobbled it up by Sunday morning, reading it during stolen moments here and there. Blogger Elizabeth Esther isn’t everyone’s cuppa tea. She’s…

  • I have been waiting impatiently for this day to come, and now it’s here and I can finally tell you what I’ve been working on for the past two months. Introducing! The Swan Children: Art Without Apologies.  The Swan Children is a bimonthly online art gallery and magazine founded to curate and showcase the creative work produced by…

  • “I would be just devastated.” It’s a word I’m not allowed to use, I think. You hit a point where too many bad things have happened to you in too short a period of time, and you suddenly have no time to be devastated because you’re pretty busy working until 7pm for someone else’s startup…