ARCHIVE FOR Julie Dalton

The Muse and the Marketplace 2021 is almost here! This year's conference is taking the form of a virtual enhanced writing residency (taking place Wednesday, April 21st - Sunday, April 25th) with new Premium Workshops and the Manuscript Mart (taking place Wednesday, April 28th - Sunday, May 2nd).

This year's conference theme is "Small Victories." We all know what the "big" victories are (landing an agent, snagging a book deal, or getting a flashy award), but this year we aim to celebrate the equally important, tiny, and often unseen victories of our writing lives. In anticipation of the conference, …

Recent Novel Incubator graduate Julie Carrick Dalton interviews Lane "The Logline Whisperer" Shefter Bishop--director, producer, and Muse & the Marketplace presenter--about how to reduce a whole novel to one pitch-perfect sentence.

I sat alone in my local coffee shop, like I do so often. Large latte, 2% milk. A table near an outlet for my laptop. Twenty minutes in, tears streamed down my cheeks. If someone looked my way, I faked a sneeze, pretending I had a cold.

I had just killed someone I loved, and I couldn’t contain my guilt—or my grief.

Just to be clear, the deceased was a character in my novel