Diane Sherlock's Blog

Hello from New Orleans and thanks to Aaron Gansky for this week’s guest post. Enjoy and let the good times roll! (note: I added the image for fun) By adgansky 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. –Kurt Vonnegut I’m going to go ahead and say it. This [...]

Over the next couple of months, Aaron D. Gansky will be making appearances as my first guest blogger. Aaron is a novelist, teacher, and editor of The Citron Review, an online literary journal. In 2009, he earned his M.F.A in Fiction at the prestigious Antioch University of Los Angeles. His short eBo

New tool for writing! But only for revisions – it would be a disaster in a first draft. In his book The Secret Life of Pronouns, James W. Pennebaker examines everything from Craigslist to the Federalist Papers. The books’ description says he uses “computational linguistics-in essence, counting the f

One of my favorite places – and most meaningful – is closing. Portrait of a Bookstore is the first place I gave a reading for my first novel, DEAD WEIGHT. They said at the time that it was one of their most successful events I love Portrait of a Bookstore – loved it before I [...]

The other night, I read a ten minute version of my life at a reunion meeting for a retreat I did in February. As I reflected on growing up, I realized I have a deep sense of gratitude of all those writers who allowed me to escape into the worlds they created. There are many [...]

Too good not to cross-post! I put it on the Tumblr for Growing Chocolate, created to promote the book with chocolate factoids, etc. Look at what researchers at UCSD discovered! “Our findings appear to add to a body of information suggesting that the composition of calories, not just the number of th

I’m having a lot of fun procrastinating creating boards for my novels and one for a short story, MegaCool, that scissors and spackle just published. My European publisher has one for our book covers.  I can’t draw well (think stick figures), so it’s an outlet to display images that I had in my head

A friend of mine just got a book deal. Am I jealous? Honestly, no. Well, why not?? Because I don’t believe in fixed-pie thinking. Success isn’t some giant pie with only 8, 12 or 16 pieces. There’s enough to go around, which isn’t the same thing as saying everyone will be successful in the way [...]