I have to be honest, I was always on the fence with National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Having worked as an editor and writer before the event became mainstream, I thought it odd that people needed one dedicated month to write a book. I thought, you either want to write a novel or you don’t. Why do you need an artificial deadline of 30 days? Then a writer friend did it and it sounded intriguing. It’s a […]
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The other day I was researching famous American inventors and came across this quote about failure from Thomas Edison. It struck me as perfect for a writer. We often submit our work for publication only to be rejected again and again. In other words, we fail all of the time. If we’re experienced, we get better at not taking the sting of rejection so personally. In fact, we can use the failures to change and better our writing. We can […]
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This last week I’ve been hammering out how I can bring my literary offerings to the forefront of my website. So I’ve been studying other author sites. Some I like, some I don’t. I won’t mention which ones are barely useful or clunky but they are sadly by some writers I love. A few strong highlights are Neil Gaiman’s whose site is as alluring, mysterious and witty as he is; Gary Shteyngart’s, which is wacky and ironic; Paula McClain’s is full of […]
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It’s Friday, August 31st, the last day of August and arguably the last month of summer. My kids are already back in school and intermittent rain has returned to Seattle. It feels like fall. Nooo! Still, fall is always a good time for me. Large chunks of writing time return and the weather gives me little reason to yearn to garden. So with that, I’ve set up a couple of author goals for myself this fall that I thought I’d […]
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Procrastination is the devil. It’s insidious, it creeps up on you when you hadn’t planned on it, it tricks you into behaving as a worse version of yourself. It thrives on your weaknesses. I’ve been thinking about procrastination lately because I’ve been doing it. Putting off revising my novel for days until I panicked late in the week and hopped on the work I’d previously given myself to do. This happened these last two weeks. I spun my wheels in […]
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