"Authoritative as it is amusing, this book distills everything Benjamin Dreyer has learned from the hundreds of books he has copyedited, including works by Elizabeth Strout, E. L. Doctorow, and Frank Rich, into a useful guide not just for writers but for everyone who wants to put their best foot forward in writing prose. Dreyer offers lessons on the ins and outs of punctuation and grammar, including how to navigate the words he calls 'the confusables,'...

"Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it's best to let the uncanny house--and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling--go to rot. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer...

"The life of a book isn't easy, especially when people judge you by your cover (not every book can be adorned with sparkly unicorns!). And this narrator should know--it's the book itself, and it has a lot of opinions. It gets irritated when readers bend its pages back, and it finds authors quite annoying. But it does have a story to tell. Through witty direct address and charming illustrations, readers meet a book that has never been read, with a...

Learn the mystery of character, character dictating plot, character information, biographies, real characters vs. fictional characters, writing a franchise character, rules to break and not to break. Subjects covered include: Who should be your protagonist? Does plot or character come first? How do you find the right characters to suit your needs? How do you get a character to do what you want? How to you get your characters to do what they want?

Cath and Wren are twin sisters who grew up as Simon Snow fans. Wren is ready to let go of fandom while Cath is not quite sure if she can make it in college and life without her sister's help.

"I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. When the Australian Mystery Writers Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. But, the Ghan is not the respite I'd been hoping for. It turns out I've trapped myself on an 1,800-mile journey with a powder keg...

"Write for Your Life is a guide for those who don't, won't, or think they can't write, what Anna Quindlen calls "civilians." Using examples past, present and future--from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison to members of her own family--Quindlen makes vivid all the ways in which writing connects us, to ourselves and to those we cherish. From love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today, and using her personal...

"Savannah Cade's dreams are coming true. The Claire Donovan, editor-in-chief of the most successful romance imprint in the country, has requested to see the manuscript Savannah's been secretly writing while working as an editor herself - except at her publishing house, the philosophy is only highbrow works are worth printing and commercial fiction, particularly romance, should be reserved for the lowest level of Dante's inferno. But when Savannah...

Sam, a shy but creative mouse who lives in a library, decides to write and illustrate his own stories which he places on the shelves with the other library books but when children find the tales, they all want to meet the author.