By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky I don’t watch a lot of television, but one show I enjoyed was Monk. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it was an old detective show based around an OCD ex-cop with an incredible power of perception. A dead body would show up, the San Francisco police…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky As is sometimes the case, one of my students asked me a particularly good question. What surprised me is that it had to do with my blog. Don’t get me wrong, I know several of you check in often, but my students rarely do. “So, Mr.…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky When you finally take the plunge into your writing career (that is—you begin to think of yourself and define yourself as a writer, published or not), the first thing that should change is the way in which you read. While you will continue to read for…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky Good friend and co-author Diane Sherlock recently blogged about the similarities between writing a novel and training for a triathlon. For sure worth reading. Take a minute to follow the link and check out what she has to say. It prompted me to look at the way I…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky I value strong openings, not only as a writer, but as an editor. When writing first pages, it will serve you well to remember that your openings (especially the first page) serve one primary purpose, and that is to establish your authorial authority. Essentially, you’re announcing…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky You’d think deserts would have predictable weather patterns: Deathly hot, Hot, and Not as hot. But here in the High Desert of California, we enjoy (or suffer) unpredictable weather patterns. The desert, for us, is not so much a lack of weather. It’s weather at the…