When last we spoke, I was relaxing on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene, basking in the glow of the mid-summer sun, with nary a care in the world.

We came home on July 2nd, and on the evening of July 3rd, as the husband and I ordered a late dinner at a local restaurant, I remarked, “Isn’t it nice that we don’t have to worry about a float for the town parade this year?”

“Wait,” he replied. “Didn’t I tell you? I signed us up for one.”

I paused, my Bellini hovering close to my lips. The parade was in 14 hours. “So someone else decorated a trailer for us to pull?” I asked, quite hopefully.

The husband’s brow furrowed. “No, I guess we still need to do that.”

The Bellini returned, untouched, to the table. “But you bought candy for tossing?”

(It’s important to note that the man had to work remotely while we were on vacation, and his brain had reached maximum capacity long before the float details arrived.)

“No. I guess we’ll have to do that after dinner, too.”

And that, my friends, is how the Cohen family of five came to be decorating a fourth-of-July float at 10pm on July 3rd. On our exceptionally dark street (the city opted for trees instead of street lamps). With the dog leaping joyfully through the tinsel, and our neighbors sauntering over to see what all the commotion was about.

What I’m Working On:

I am still waiting for feedback on my edits, which is fine by me as July is a big prep month for the Camperdown MFA program. I have grading to wrap up from the June residency. The professors and I go over our syllabi and make any changes for the upcoming year, and then I make sure everything is formatted and updated (this takes a shocking amount of time, perhaps because I’m technologically challenged, perhaps because the lesser gods of PDF despise me). I review the final round of applicants, and the committee meets to accept or reject them.

Additionally, Joe Rigney and I filmed our Pride and Prejudice lectures for Canon+, and those are now available to watch if you have a subscription. Feedback has been very positive for the series, and we’re already planning the next book we’ll tackle.

In mid-July I gave two plenary talks at the Called Conference on creativity. High-school students are one of my favorite groups to talk to because their enthusiasm levels hover between mach 3 and mach 7, and they ask interesting and often unfiltered questions. Just for fun, I read them the prologue to The Second Greatest Thief (with the caveat that it could change).

Lastly, I am working my way through a number of questionnaires on the Viking Penguin author portal. I researched and wrote the first draft of The Second Greatest Thief so long ago that it’s been a bit of a struggle to remember my process, but I’ll get there eventually!

What I’m Reading:

(with new affiliate links!)

I started off July by rereading Pride and Prejudice, although this time I grabbed an annotated version that had a lot of interesting facts on the side. This would be a great gift for the Austen lover in your life.

After that I picked up The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater, her debut adult literary fiction. There is something about Steifvater’s writing style that I find so compelling, and this was no exception. Along with the magical realism of the sweetwater and the copious amounts of research she did, there was plenty to love.

I moved back over to Young Adult and discovered Echo North, a delightful retelling of Beauty and the Beast and Tam Lin with a magical house that reminded me of Diana Wynne Jones. I’m a sucker for intriguing world building, and this one delivered.

On Audiobook, I listened to Tress of the Emerald Sea by Sanderson which was a full-cast production that I think my teens would enjoy. And I just wrapped up Wait Till Next Year, a stellar memoir about 1950s New York and baseball.

A Writing Tip

I’ve had quite a few questions come in recently about world-building. How do you make a world believable? Would you describe everything someone eats? How do you make it unique? I could (and would like to!) do a whole series on world-building at some point, but since these tips are meant to be short, I’m just going to talk today about details.

The best way to make your world believable is to make us feel like we are there. We need to see, smell, taste, touch, and hear your world, and the way you deliver those sensations to an audience is through concrete details. It’s one thing to tell me someone ate a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese for lunch. It’s something else entirely if it’s a stale loaf of rye bread that crumbles at the touch, paired with a soggy wedge of cheddar already molding at the corners. Or a spongy slice of sourdough that’s golden with butter and perfectly chewy with sharp white cheddar that’s creamy and tangy all at once. Any time you write a noun (table, tree, shoe, horse) ask yourself if you can be more specific. Specificity creates believability.

How this can go wrong: Sometimes when we’re excited about the world we’ve created, we accidentally bore the reader with too many details. So don’t spend three straight paragraphs describing a feast. Try to fit it into a sentence or two, maybe three if you must. Usually, it’s better to sprinkle the details throughout the scene rather than dumping them all at the beginning. You can incorporate them into beats very nicely. So perhaps, in the middle of a dialogue exchange, you might pause to say, “John cut a thick wedge of cheddar cheese and dabbed at the crumbling bits with his finger.” That achieves two goals: it breaks up a long block of dialogue with a breath and it gives us concrete details.

When I was preparing to write The Second Greatest Thief, I read a lot of books about 19th century New York. As I read, I kept a running list of words or phrases I wanted to use. A lot of them were criminal slang or architectural phrases or aspects of clothing/goods/commerce that were unique to that time. When I was writing a new scene, I would reach for that list and see what words I could incorporate.

Another way this can go wrong: If you’re writing high fantasy, make sure you don’t overload the reader with strange and elaborate words and concepts. You may have spent six months getting comfortable with all these crazy phrases, but your reader is encountering them for the first time. Go easy on them or they may put your book down in despair, having lost the plot in a tangle of babble. Try to intersperse unfamiliar words with familiar ones, and if there isn’t a good reason to call the swords in your world schmythringerz, then just call them broadswords.

That’s all for July, see you in August!