Just started reading for a contest, and I'm not on this side of the aisle very often, but can already confirm: people are pulling for you. Rooting HARD to love your story. They are opening every single doc hoping and hoping and hoping that yours will be the one.

my daughter had to use my laptop for school and accidentally closed out of all my carefully curated open tabs, and at first I started to panic but what if she actually just propelled me toward sweet, sweet freedom

Just reread a chapter I drafted a few weeks ago in which a character is about to reveal CRUCIAL info to another character. “There’s something you should know,” he says ominously. I remember this was a huge, breakthrough plot moment. I do NOT remember the crucial information.💀

10yo who’s been super into writing stories lately: My favorite thing is when I start to write a chapter and I DEFINITELY know what I’m going to say, and then the characters surprise me. Me: That’s really cool, isn’t it? 10yo: Actually it is also my least favorite thing

10yo: Bruh, guess what happened at school today? Me: Honey. I’m your mom. Let’s maybe work on calling me something else. 10yo: Ack sorry, sorry, bruh-DETTE, guess what happened at school today

Took a very long break from writing flash fiction to finish the novel and have a baby, and it feels incredible to receive my first acceptance in over a year. FROM COPPER NICKEL. I am beside myself.

A story I started submitting in 2020—and indefinitely retired almost two years later—just won a contest. All it took was the right theme. Your shelved work is not dead.

That story rejection is just tidying up your Submittable queue and now you have more space to find its One True Match

thriller writers have it ROUGH these days bc in 2000 it was plausible to be like “…and the missing woman was never found” but now you get to contend with readers thinking “yeah right, didn’t she have a phone, what was her GPS history, why did no one use the Find My Body app”

maybe by the time I’m 70 I will finally stop having the dream in which I’m suddenly about to take a final exam for a math class I’ve never been to and didn’t even know I had

In the middle of a loud, chaotic drive I told the kids my brain was breaking and could they please be quiet JUST FOR A MINUTE and in a deep announcer voice my 9yo goes “Melissa Bowers is taking a sixty-second time out” and this is how you know you’re watching way too many sports

a weird thing about the current state of social media is that I now have twice as many accounts as I used to but collectively use them half as often

Truly a dream to have won the Copper Nickel Editors' Prize in Prose. It was already such an honor just to be published! Thank you to Teague Bohlen, Wayne Miller, and everyone at this extraordinary journal. What an incredible experience from start to finish.