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In January 2020, the novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins hit bookstores after months of positive reviews and being selected to Oprah’s Book Club. Then Latinx critics called out the book detailing a Mexican bookseller crossing the U.S. border to escape a drug cartel as perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Cummins is not Mexican, although claims Puerto Rican heritage, and critics repeated what th…

It only takes a cursory perusal of today’s news coverage to happen upon a fight about book banning. It seems to be increasing in frequency, which is concerning to those of us who write books and believe in the freedom of expression. Like most aspects of human progression over time, book banning goes in cycles. And we repeatedly have to push back against it. The beginning of book banning Chinese…

I recently finished writing my 18th book. To some that makes me a baby writer, but to others it’s seasoned writer territory. Wherever you fall on that scale, I think we can all agree that by book 18 you’ve probably figured out the basic structure of a book and reader expectations for your genre. That doesn’t mean you won’t run into issues while writing. My issue with book 18 was that I could no…

In 2002, I was a second-year English teacher in a struggling northern Ohio town. Poverty was rampant, and investment in education was inconsistent. That year, 15 percent of my students were parents; of the 88 counties in Ohio, our county had the highest teen pregnancy rate. My job? To get seniors to read and write at a level that would boost job opportunities—and occasionally, college acceptanc…

Many novelists are discovering the rewards of writing for games, whether game-ifying their own concepts or as staff or freelance writers for established gaming properties. In 2022, an estimated 3.2 billion people worldwide played games, and the average age of a gamer is 31. Led by video games and mobile gaming, the gaming industry aims for total earnings around $300 billion for this fiscal year…

Finding the exact origins of the fantasy genre can be as elusive as defining its boundaries in today’s marketplace. While it was once an add-on to the realms of science fiction and horror, the popularity of fantasy fiction, with all its variations, continues to grow. Oprahdaily.com touted 2022 as a “spectacular year for fantasy fiction.” A January 2023 Publishers Weekly article noted that adult…