In the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken, the famous lines read:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What follows is a thought piece on how getting stuck on one project—instead of feeling free to switch up and work on what moves—can be difficult. One thing that may surprise people is that the writer Misha Lazzara was working on another novel for about three years, before she pivoted to her first-ever novel idea—that she carried around with her for eight years between undergrad and grad—the one that became Manmade Constellations, forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing.

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Benjamin Cunningham is a correspondent for The Economist. He covered Central and Eastern Europe for six years, and now writes about the wider Mediterranean region from Barcelona. In addition he contributes to The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aspen Review, Le Monde Diplomatique and is an opinion columnist for Sme, Slovakia’s main daily newspaper. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. Cunningham began his journalism career with newspapers in Michigan (Pontiac, Saginaw, Grand Rapids and Detroit). After earning a master’s degree from the University of Amsterdam, he lived for six months in Vranje, Serbia reporting on the newly independent Kosovo and supervising youth cross-border cooperation programs in this troubled post-war region. He later moved to Prague, where he went on to…

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One of the most important people impacting the trajectory of an author’s career is a literary agent. Why then can it sometimes seem impossible to get information about the practices of some literary agencies? This leaves writers feeling like Spider-Man perched outside opaque windows unable to see into the Manhattan skyscraper where vital things related to their interests are happening.

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Justin Madson is a self-taught cartoonist who has been telling stories through comic books and graphic novels for nearly two decades. Over the years he has created a number of graphic novels, including the post-apocalyptic tale Breathers, and Carbon, a supernatural mystery. Madson’s forthcomic graphic novel with Abrams/Amulet Books is Tin Man, a young adult graphic novel about unlikely friends—a tin man seeking a heart and a high schooler trying to come to terms with the death of her grandmother. He resides in a small town in Wisconsin with his wife, two kids, two dogs, and a slew of backyard chickens.

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Lucy Score is a Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon bestselling author. Small town contemporary rom-coms are her lady jam and she enjoys delivering the feels with a huge side of happily ever after. Her books have been translated into several languages, making readers around the world snort laugh, swoon, and sob. Lucy lives in Pennsylvania with the devastatingly handsome Mr. Lucy and their horrible cat. In her spare time she enjoys sleeping, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and reading all the romance novels in the universe. Her next major rom-com is forthcoming from Hachette Books.

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Lesley Kagen is a multi-award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of nine previous novels, the latest of which is Every Now and Then. She has worked as an actress, voice-over-talent, sought-after speaker, child advocate, student storyteller, and writing instructor. The mother of two and grandmother of two, Kagen lives in a hundred and fifty year old farmhouse in a small town in Wisconsin.

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Marko Perko is a graduate of the University of Southern California. He has always had an insatiable thirst for knowledge of all types, and as such, he is highly regarded as a modern-day Renaissance man, author, historian, polymath, and polemicist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and wildly popular book entitled Did You Know That...? now in its fourth edition. He is the author of the upcoming novel Lethal Action: A Nick Raasay Thriller and the co-author of the work of fiction entitled Khamsin: A Thriller. Moreover, he is the writer of the international bestselling knowledge-based board game Twenty Questions. He is also the creator of the Cultural Enrichment Programs education series, and he is active in software development―Krypti.com. Perko has also written for and edited numerous publications, and he has worked as a columnist, speechwriter, composer, musician, lecturer, and playwright. He is a member of …

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G. M. Malliet’s first DCI St. Just mystery won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was later nominated for Anthony, Macavity, and Left Coast Crime awards. The series continues in Oct 2021 with Death in Cornwall. A new series with Augusta Hawke appears in 2022, also from Severn House. Malliet was nominated for a 2020 Macavity Award for best short story for “Whiteout,” which also placed 3rd in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Readers Choice Awards. Her novella Murder at Morehead Mews was nominated for a Derringer and was a finalist in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Readers Choice Awards.

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The year was 1417; the Renaissance was not yet in full bloom; there was no printing press; Columbus was decades away from sailing the ocean blue; and Martin Luther’s Reformation was still a century in the future. But an event of epic proportions occurred, one hard winter day that year, when a man fast approaching forty, short in physical stature but keenly alert, made an astonishing discovery that had laid hidden to the world for some fifteen centuries. His name was Poggio Bracciolini. He was a writer, scholar, and Renaissance humanist, and he had once been the personal secretary, the Apostolicus Secretarius, of Pope Martin V. In his vaunted position, he regularly took dictation from the pope and wrote letters on his behalf. Subsequently, as a book hunter, he was responsible for discovering many original Latin manuscripts and seeing that they were preserved, by copying each one with great precision. As such, he became famous for his exquisite and highly-readable book hand. In fact, other …

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T. Jefferson Parker is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-six novels, including Silent Joe and California Girl, both of which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. His next novel, A Thousand Steps, is due out from Forge in January 2022. When not writing, Jeff likes to fish in Baja, hike in San Diego and settle in for the evening with a good book.

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Carl Smith is Commissioning Editor at Severn House (an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd), where he acquires genre fiction—mysteries, thrillers, cozies and science-fiction & fantasy. Prior to starting at Severn House in 2018, he spent four years working across non-fiction, covering content as diverse as political essays and children’s craft books. Carl lives and works in London, England, but his list comprises primarily U.S.-based authors. Carl has acquired Agatha and Anthony Award-winning authors during his time with Severn House. His list includes G.M. Malliet, Catriona McPherson, Qiu Xiaolong, Elaine Viets, and more. Carl can be found at on Twitter at @thatpubblogger where he offers career advice to publishing hopefuls, or emailed at carl@severnhouse.com regarding submissions.

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New York Times bestselling investigative journalist and serial crime expert M. William Phelps is the author of more than thirty nonfiction books, with over one million copies of his books in print worldwide, and has made over 200 television appearances (Early Show, The Today Show, The View, Fox & Friends, Discovery Channel, Fox News Channel, GMA, TLC, History, Oxygen, OWN, and many others). He appeared on USA Radio Network, Catholic Radio, Wall Street Journal Radio, ABC News Radio, and many more. Phelps created, produced and starred in the series Dark Minds and is one of the stars of Deadly Women and Oxygen’s Snapped, Killer Couples and KillerPost. He is the winner of the Excellence in (Investigative) Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the New England Book Festival Award. A respected reporter, Phelps has written for numerous publications—including …

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Having grown up in a remote and forgotten place myself, surrounded by uninhabited forest wilderness punctuated by lawlessness and constantly-looming human threat, I find myself always reaching for novels where settings of the remote or the forgotten are driving forces, inhabiting the story as much as the characters, shaping the story’s emotional tenor, functioning as the story’s beating heart. Remote and forgotten settings often demonstrate both intense beauty and intense hardship, highlighting everything in society over which we both celebrate or despair. These are places that inform who we are as humans, and also who we might become.

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Jacob Surpin is currently senior editor and associate publisher at Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Parallax Press, which is distributed by Penguin Random House and is based in Berkeley, California. A Brooklyn native, he has also worked at Unnamed Press and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He was exposed to Buddhist thought in high school and it has been a presence in his life ever since. He first heard of Thich Nhat Hanh in college, when one of his classes read Thay’s response to the beating of Rodney King, printed in the Los Angeles Times in 1991. As an editor, Jacob is most interested in projects that have the potential to change and challenge the way we think and live. When he’s not editing, he enjoys getting outside with his family, friends, and dog, and being unabashedly hopeful (there’s always next year) about the New York Mets.

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William F. Nolan was a multi-award-winning author of science fiction, fantasy and horror novels—most notably the creator of Logan’s Run, which went on to become a cult classic film, based on the novel of the same name, with a remake due out from Warner Bros. Among his many accolades, Nolan was nominated for Best Paperback Original by the Mystery Writers of America. He was voted a Living Legend in Dark Fantasy by the International Horror Guild in 2002, and in 2006 was bestowed the honorary title of Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 2010, he received the Lifetime Achievement Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association (HWA). In 2013, he was a recipient of the World Fantasy Convention Award in Brighton, England by the World Fantasy Convention. …

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James Chapman is an illustrator from Birmingham, England. A little further north in Manchester now, he’s working on all kinds of illustration and art projects—often themed around language and diversity. He worked on the series Sounds All Around, a set of illustrations about the exciting world of international onomatopoeia. (While in English a dog goes, "Woof" and a pig goes, "Oink," in Romanian, dogs go, "Ham" and in German, pigs go, "Grunz") From animals to people to cars to fireworks, everything makes a sound and every language interprets those sounds differently—and Chapman did his best to illustrate them all. The illustrations have drawn a lot of attention online with various features and even an endorsement from Ashton Kutcher. Chapman is currently a background artist at Brown Bag Films animation studio in Manchester, but he is still working on freelance and personal projects at the time. His next book, A World of Wisdom, is forthcoming from Andrews McMeel …

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Donya Dickerson is the associate publisher of business books at McGraw Hill Professional. She is an experienced associate publisher with a history of working with authors on developing bestselling content and building brands as thought leaders and experts in their fields. Since 2004, Donya has worked as an executive editor across the other McGraw imprints, including McGraw Hill and McGraw Hill Eduction. She obtained her Master’s in comparative literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. As an editor and publisher, Donya is well-attuned to trends in the industry, willing to brainstorm ideas, a creative thinker, and focused on making her books a success, both within McGraw Hill and to the external world of book buyers.

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Coree Spencer is a comedian based in California who organized the Cinder Block Comedy Festival, which received press coverage in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and the Village Voice for its empowerment of marginalized groups. Her illustrator collaborator Emily Niland is a Brooklyn-based illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, and Thrillist.

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Otto Penzler is the president and CEO of Mysterious Press. He's also the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and is regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on crime, mystery and suspense fiction. Penzler founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, which he later sold to Warner Books (1989). He reacquired the imprint in 2010 and published literary crime fiction as an imprint at Grove/Atlantic. As of January 2021, The Mysterious Press is independently owned. Penzler also publishes both original works and classic crime fiction through Mysterious Press.

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You may have heard the saying that 90% of painting a house is in the prep work—in the careful taping of edges and windows panes with blue tape; its in the covering of wooden floors and furniture with plastic tarp; in carefully taping over outlets and lighting fixtures; and in removing handles from cupboards. You may not notice a great paint job immediately, but you sure can spot a bad one: from drips of paint running down a window pane… to a mist of old blue paint peeking out from behind the layer of fresh cream paint like the five o'clock shadow of an unkempt beard. You may spot a hardened stream of paint splattered carelessly on your sink basin or tub. Imagine a new buyer wandering through, noticing the rushed paint job. Might they wonder—if you were this careless in painting, what else might be wrong? You’ve immediately lost the confidence of the people who are looking at the fine details. It is the same with writing: a slap dash proposal can give this same bad impression, as opposed to one that is neat, organized, and clearly thought through.

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