#12… does that mean I’ve been doing this for a year already? *checks notes* Ok, not quite because at first I was doing two a month… That started December 2022. And I skipped September.. I was busy. Busy with what? Keep reading. PNWA Writers Conference 2023 I went to my very first writers con a…
There is a Sir Terry Pratchett’s quote that is a part of my personal gospel: the first draft is just you telling the story. The gist is that we should not be self-critical about the first draft. We should blaze ahead with creative abandon rather than get in our own way at such an early…
I found out about Elizabeth Lesser’s book Cassandra Speaks through Brene’ Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast. The book intrigued me because it promised to speak to the parts of the human story – history – that have been silenced, suppressed or unasked for. The subtitle is ‘When women are the storytellers, the human story changes’. I…
NaNoWriMo2020 is now just days away. I started last week with a lot of options for which story take on during my month-long quest for 50K words. One idea was to expand on the story of Merton, the 4 year old who murdered his nanny to open a portal to another dimension and is actually…
I took the Goodreads reading challenge last year and put my goal at 50 books. I got to 41. A mix of fiction and non-fiction. Fiction was mostly speculative, fantasy and scifi genres. Much of my non-fiction reading was motivated by a desire to learn about whiteness and systemic racism and included works of history,…
Idea for a resolution, if you do those: If you’ve been a person who often has a platform and is comfortable telling your story, consciously make space for people who don’t have a platform and are nervous/anxious/afraid to tell their story. There’s a lot of power in stories. Grant some of that power to those…
I listened to a podcast this morning called The Writer Files; the specific episode was called The Best of ‘The Writer’s Brain’ Part One: Creativity. The guest was neuroscientist Michael Gybko and addressed creativity as a brain function. They also talked about ideas on how a person could increase their creativity. The gist of it…
I have been a fan of science fiction for a long, long time. I love and respect the genre and its masters so much that I have felt intimidated about the prospect of writing within it. I’ve tried a few times, one story was submitted to the now-defunct erotic magazine, Salacious for their sci-fi edition. …
I often find the my characters tell me what I need to know about them in order to write the story. Not all at once, necessarily, but eventually. As I was getting to know Kevin, the narrator for the novel I’m writing, one thing jumped out right away – this guy was a reporter, a…
This quote is from Marisa Cummings of Creative Thursday. I will eventually have the first line of this quote tattooed to my arm. I have this quote posted on the wall above my desk as an inspiration, as a reminder. The Gatekeepers are Gone. There is no one standing between me and my goals. You…