Writer's Digest May - June 2016

1 Untangling the Web This year’s 101 Best Websites (Page 33) delves deeper than ever before, with special “Insider’s Guides” to mining the most content-rich resources. Exclusively online, find bonus guides to two more standouts on our list: Writer’s Carnival and Make a Living Writing. 2 Embracing Adaptation In this expanded Q&A, WD Interviewee Rainbow Rowell (Page 44) talks about how her beginnings as a journalist influence her fiction—and how she recently came to apply her novel-writing skills to a screenplay. 3 Reading for the Win The winners of WD’s 11th Annual Popular Fiction Awards (Page 48) bested nearly 1,300 entries across six categories. Read the top stories in every genre, and find out how you can enter this year. To find all of the above online companions to this…

Untangling the Web Most writers I know have a love/hate relationship with the Internet—and all that comes with it. Some days, we marvel at the capability to connect with writers and readers the world over, to publish without a middleman, to tap resources beyond the wildest dreams of the great generations of writers before us. We tweet our enthusiasm for Stephen King’s new book, and blink at our phones in giddy disbelief when he sends a personal reply. We self-publish e-books we know we never could have funded with a print run, and make a few fans of our own—we share our first 5-star customer reviews far and wide. We stumble upon just the tip we needed, meet critique partners, discover new writers, connect, grow. Other days, we get sucked…

JESSICA ALLEN (“The Others,” Page 14) has written about the palaces of Rajasthan for CNN, Harlem for The Boston Globe, street art for Mental Floss, reading for The Washington Post, infants’ personalities for McSweeney’s, superstitions for The Toast, and Trans-Siberian Railway menu options for Serious Eats. These days she writes a lot about parenting her son, who’s still too young to complain. Find her online at jessallenica.com. ROBERT BREWER (“Blog Your Way to Success” Page 23) is senior content editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community, editing the annual Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market books. A former Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, Brewer writes about poetry on his Poetic Asides blog, and authored the poetry collection Solving the World’s Problems. He works from home just north of Atlanta. Follow him…

“Your article inspired me to roll up my sleeves and dive in. Thanks for bringing this freelancer back to life.” TAXPERTISE I am a writer, not a gambler, yet for me Jan. 20 had the feel of a casino table where the house held the winning cards in a high-stakes gamble. Seated on one side was my accountant, and on the other, an IRS appeals officer, with two cards faceup on the table—dealt to me by an unfriendly IRS tax auditor two years ago. The IRS auditor had declared my writing career a “hobby”—not a profession. She disallowed most of my writing-related expenses for two years, and socked me with a $12,000 bill, claiming defrayed expenses and hobby-loss fraud. The kicker? The appeals officer held the ace in her hand:…

We writers tend to live inside our own heads. We’re constantly worrying about the progress of our story, the future of the publishing industry, or when we’re going to get that next soy latte fix. Occasionally the noise reaches a cacophonic level that drowns out the words we want to hear. And then what do we do? With 15 years, seven published books, a novella and one anthology behind me, I have turned to meditation to silence discord, foster creativity and increase productivity. And I’m not alone. Meditation, once the province of aesthetics and hippies, has gone mainstream, with such noted personalities as newscaster Dan Harris, basketball star Kobe Bryant and author Elizabeth Gilbert all espousing its benefits. In our increasingly cluttered, tech-centered lives, meditation makes space for creativity to…

Non-writers might assume we slaves to our keyboards spend our days slogging away at constructing and destructing sentences. Ha! Admittedly, that’s how my workdays generally begin. I’ll depict my writing process using Snoopy’s signature opener: It was a dark and stormy night. I study the sentence, then strike with my wordsmith wand: It was a dark and stormy gloomy sort of night. I flirt with alliteration: It was a dark and stormy tempestuous type of night. Eventually, I succumb to frustration: It was one of those stormy freakishly difficult-to-describe-right nights. The ping of an incoming email brings welcome distraction. It’s my buddy, the deposed king of Burundi, popping in for a chat. The lives of kings are clearly more complicated than those of writers. Frank (his Burundian name is difficult…