This article is another amazing collaboration between myself, the editor who's been leaving notes everywhere, and our wonderful guest writer, Chartres Royale. We have been discussing, romance novels lately, mostly the wavering biases that seem to surround them. Whether there is some internalized dislike of the feminine or the difficulty one might feel surrounding relatability to romance novels, there's always something new to bring to the conference. We've decided to expand o

Dear Purposeful Prose, Given America’s growing literacy crisis, will books as we know them continue to stay relevant? Will authors still be able to publish books and expect to be read? What kind of society are we creating? If you haven’t already read “ Speech Sounds ” by Octavia Butler, it was published in Azimov’s Science Fiction Magazine  in 1983. In a mysterious pandemic, researcher and scholar Valerie Rye is navigating life suddenly unable to read or comprehend the writte

Dear Purposeful Prose, I’ve been working on my book for a few years now, giving it space and returning to it when I’m ready to write again. At this point, I feel as though I’ve written all I can write and that it is a full first draft. Now that I have a first draft, how do I move forward? What do I do next? Do I self-edit? Do I immediately go to an editor or beta readers? This question is more common than you might think. The first draft can feel like solid stone, and since y