Tanara McCauley

Culturally Imagined Stories

Tag: perseverance

  • Tainted: Querying March 1, 2025

    Hi everybody! I will officially begin querying for Tainted, my debut fantasy novel, on March 1st.  For those of you unfamiliar with the writing world, to query is to pitch your project to an agent for representation. It’s a behind-the-scenes deal, which means there won’t be a book in hand by March 1st nor will I reveal names of…

  • Beautiful

    A woman had a dream. She walked for miles through fields and deserts, grasslands and marshes, following the sun. It warmed her face and shined in her eyes, making her squint as she journeyed. She pushed aside tall stalks of wheat, trudged through wet sand. She strained her thighs up steep mountainsides. In every place…

  • The Labor of the Journey

    “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain…” John 15:16 My youngest is in the first weeks of her kindergarten career. After years of seeing her older siblings off to school and spending her days with me all…

  • When the Odd Bird Flies

    Odd bird. It’s an expression my family uses for something or someone who strikes us as unusual. The context can be positive, such as a quirky or endearing oddity; or it can be of the don’t-make-eye-contact variety. A bird of the former type attends my daughter’s gymnastics school. She’s tall and pale, all angles and…

  • Gone Fishing, Author Style

    This was originally posted on 11/09/2013. It’s that time of year again… As a child, I fished with my father. Dark, quiet nights, sometimes nothing but the calm sound of water lapping the bank, or the buzz of mosquitoes testing the perimeter of whatever insect repellent we wore. It’s been a long time since we’ve…

  • Falling Off the Writing Wagon

    “Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” ~ Confucious Quite an inspiring declaration. Too bad “inspiring” is not synonymous with “truth.” I love to write. The process of weeding out an idea, then turning that idea into hundreds of pages, is beyond rewarding. But make no mistake about…

  • Deleted Scenes

    Ever watch the deleted scenes of a movie? Better yet, ever watch the deleted scenes of an animated movie? If you’d asked me that question ten years and three kids ago, my response might’ve been an incredulous, “What on earth for?” Nowadays, however, it’s an all-wise sounding, “But of course.” In the world of writing (an…

  • With Eyes Set Ahead

    Writing is…well…hard. The temptation to quit lurks at the crosswalk of every failure, around the corner of any rejection, and along the alleys of each hard-to-write story. It’s not when the temptation confronts me, but when I actually entertain it, that I’m given a way out of the temptation with a message that speaks exactly to what…

  • Dare to Live the Dream

    Every dream has a starting point. My love of reading, and the eventual desire to write, began in the pages of two childhood classics. Where the Red Fern Grows is the first book to ever make me weep. Not cry. Weep. Hysterically. As if my house had just gone up in flames and every family…

  • WriMo NoMo, but Keep it Up Writers!

    NaNoWriMo is over, and like thousands of other writers, I hit over 50,000 words in thirty days. Sure a few things had to give. Blogging, for one, was chucked like an old pair of tennis shoes and left hanging on the telephone poll of “to-do-later.” And though I’d love to say my house stayed in…