I know that some of you out there are as obsessive as me when it comes to trying to figure out how far along you are in National Novel Writing Month so I decided to share my personal calculator. It’s simple but powerful. This calculator will work in Open Office, Microsoft Excel or Google Drive, depending on what you use. But it works best in Google...
Read MoreWrite for the job you want
Write for the job you want, not the one you have There’s an expression that says, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have,” and it applies well to your writing life. Even though you’re just starting out, you likely know where you ultimately want to be. You know the writing life you want to have, even though you’re...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo Pep Talk: Winning Isn’t Everything
NaNoWriMo is nearly over. Only 8 days until this whole wild challenge is behind us and we’re swept up in the holiday chaos that accelerates us all into the end of the year. I know some of you have already reached or even surpassed 50,000 words and I want you to know that you are awesome and have accomplished something amazing here this month. I am so darn...
Read MoreWriters: Finish what you start
Consider yourself warned: There’s a point, usually around the halfway point of your story but not always, when you will hit a moment of crisis. This story is a mess, my writing is awful, the characters are flat and dull, and the whole thing is falling apart. Why am I even bothering to write this? This feeling will often coincide with the siren call...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo Pep Talk: It’s just your sloppy copy
Take failure off the table
It was summer. My daughter was five years old and just learning to go underwater. All-day long she’d done tentative little dips, dunking her face, sliding across the surface of the water. Then she dropped her goggles. She lunged for them, but it was too late. Down down down, they sank to the very bottom of the deep end of the pool. Over and over, she...
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