I wasn’t planning to write another penguin novel. In the spring before My Last Continent was published, I’d traveled to the Galápagos Islands to see penguins and other wildlife—it wasn’t meant to be a research trip. Yet it turned into one after I learned about the bizarre human history of Floreana Island.

There’s a common misconception that when you’re writing fiction with non-realistic elements (often called speculative fiction) that you can just make up whatever you want, in other words that you don’t have to do research. 

Spoiler alert: bodies are strange. I think I first realized this when I was nine and dropped a frozen turkey on my big toe. The skin turned purple, and I sobbed for a good hour, and I stopped picking up things I wasn’t supposed to for the rest of the year.

In 2017 I started writing an essay about growing up with Tourette Syndrome. The essay, I hoped, would be a springboard into a larger book…

All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere is a short story collection years in the making, and months in compiling. I wish I could say that I had some grand plan when writing the stories in this collection, but I did not.

Did you always want to be a writer? people often ask. But for most of my life, writing was  something I steered away from. I still have a tape somewhere, from an astrology reading gifted  by a friend, in which the reader asserts that everything in my chart points to writing, while I  insist that…

The night after receiving mass shooter training at my university, I woke from a dream of four people attacking a shooter who’d breached the door of their classroom. They grabbed his arms and legs, as I’d been taught in training. Someone else sunk their fingers into his eyes, as I’d been taught. But it didn’t…

On January 1, 1984, Robert “Peanut” Griffin, a petty criminal on trial for murder, broke out of a Mississippi courthouse jail and, during a standoff between him and my father on the courthouse roof, threatened to kill my pregnant mother, my unborn sister, and me, two years old at the time.

Country of Under is my first published book, but the first book I worked on, in different forms for seven years, was a memoir. That memoir revolved around my relationship with my father, a pilot who became a quadriplegic in an accident when I was ten, a year after my parents divorced, and his years…

Confession: I’ve never played an instrument. Was never held hostage by a purse-lipped piano tyrant. Never regaled the quad with the thick-skulled tabs of “Smoke on the Water” or “You Really Got Me.” Never even had the devilish pleasure of driving my parents insane with atonal bleats from a school-issued recorder. 

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Nicole M. Wolverton writes about A Misfortune of Lake Monsters from CamCat Books.

Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Mindy Friddle writes about Her Best Self from Regal House Publishing.