Alyssa Palombo: Balancing Blogging & Writing

Guest historical fiction author Alyssa Palombo speaks with host Mindy McGinnis about her novels, The Violinist of Venice and The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence. Alyssa also shares about querying a novel that wasn't ready yet, immersing herself in the time period of her characters, the shifting standards of beauty from age to age, and how to balance blogging and writing fiction.

Kurt Dinan: Writing Humor

Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire welcomes Kurt Dinan, author of the YA novel, DON’T GET CAUGHT, which was recently nominated for YALSA’s Teen Top Ten. Kurt joins host Mindy McGinnis to talk about how querying is like taking a stick in the eye every day, and how writing short stories helped him be a better novelist. Also covered: how mashups not only help pitch a book, but can also help the author find a key to unlocking their project, as well as the specific struggles of writing humor, and every writer’s worst enemy – procrastination. Lastly, Mindy tries very hard to wheedle him into using social media more, and they talk about things you didn’t know were poisonous, as well as their porn names.