Thought I'd write a quick update for you all about how things on my first official National Novel Writing Month outing are going. The short, optimistic answer is: Good! The short, realistic answer is: Different than I expected! In a previous post, I talked about my strategy heading into this month of insane output. It… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 1
[Photo credit: NBC] NBC's new fall comedy Perfect Harmony has some of my favorite things: choir, jokes about conservative ideals (I grew up conservative, so it "strikes a chord" with me, har har), and Bradley Whitford (most recently of Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale). As a friend put it, it's like a reverse Sister Act. I'm… Continue reading NBC’s Perfect Harmony & the Problem with Beginnings
I'm going to try NaNoWriMo this year. That sentence is terrifying. Well, not if you don't know what the abbreviation stands for. It's National Novel Writing Month, which is November 1-30 every year. Basically, a bunch of psychos try to write 50,000-word novel drafts in a month. There's a little more nuance than that. But… Continue reading NaNoWriMo What Now?
Novel outlining methods look so great on paper. Everything is in neat steps. You basically have an organized checklist for writing 50k+ words. But none of them work for me. A large part of being an artist is understanding your own creative process. If you can learn to work with yourself, your strengths and weaknesses,… Continue reading The Feminine Creative Process
Got a little good news RE: the novel I've been working on. If that's interesting to you, awesome, and if not, no harm no foul. Ignore, click away, and good juju to you. Back in May, I entered my post-apocalyptic novel in the Colorado Gold Writing Contest. It's a novel-writing contest for unpublished writers that includes… Continue reading Writing Contest News…
I've been thinking about scarcity mindset and abundance mindset lately. Generally, as in this NPR interview, they are applied to the way people spend their money or use their resources. Stephen Covey (the man who coined the terms) applied them to the ways people do business. I think there is an application for writers. But first,… Continue reading Scarcity Mindset and the Writing Life
Just dropping in this peaceful Sunday morning to share some good news... I'm thrilled to announce that I am the new Book Recommendations Editor at The Bookends Review! I am excited about this opportunity to participate in the writing community in a new way. And, wouldn't you know it, the reading period for The Bookends… Continue reading I’M AN EDITOR Y’ALL
When I started seriously studying the craft of writing fiction, the way I understood story evolved. Grad school and all of the amazing professors I had and the amazing things I read rewired my brain to read in a technical way: as a writer, not a reader. It feels a little like x-ray vision. I… Continue reading Is The Lord of the Rings Really That Great?
Ursula K. Le Guin says, resoundingly, "Wrong!" The second chapter of her book on writing, Steering the Craft, is all about punctuation. (Check out my post about the first chapter here!) She writes, "...punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing." It is a crucial tool, and not to be overlooked. My experience with… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 2: PUNCTUATION
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best and most important contemporary writers of science fiction. Her prose is immaculate, whether she was focusing on gender politics in The Left Hand of Darkness, consumer culture in The Dispossessed, creating sci-fi tech that others will use for decades (the ansible: a communication device that relays… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 1: SOUND
