writing life

  • What Comes Next: Thoughts on Finishing a 1st Draft

    I finished the first draft of my first novel. It’s been a project I’ve started, stopped, and restarted several times over the last decade. Despite loving the story more than ever, I found it harder and harder to find the energy and motivation to finish the story. But at 8:30pm on December 31st, I finished

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  • Writing, Community, and NaNoWriMo

    I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo for nearly a decade.  Over the years, I wrote about NaNoWriMo on this blog. I first heard about this annual event in my creative writing class in high school. While the thought of writing an entire novel in a month felt daunting, the community aspect excited me. Writers from all

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  • Writing in the Fantasea

    Writing in the Fantasea

    I wet the tip of my pen like dipping toes into the ink black sea. Knowing it would be best to jump in all at once, I wade in line by line, staring at the endless expanse before me. The surface is calm, intimidating in it’s emptiness that hides entire worlds waiting to be released.

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  • A Poem A Day

    A Poem A Day

    A poem a day,Some therapists say,Holds darkness at bay,And keeps madness delayed. A poem a day,The readers will say,helps the soul to conveywhat it’s hidden away. But, A poem a day,The writers all say,May keep the muses in sway,But won’t keep the bills paid.

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  • Writing Week: Planning My Own Writer’s Retreat

    I’m thinking of taking a week off of work to write. I have over 2 weeks of PTO to use before the end of the year, and I don’t have any trips planned. Over the last few weeks I’ve been bitten by the writing bug. I have so many ideas for new drafts, redrafts, and

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  • Poetic Struggle

    Poetic Struggle

    There’s so many thoughts I cannot put into words. Sometimes the struggle is in finding an original way to express thoughts already spoken: the happiness of a bright sunflower in the summer, the melancholy of toy in the rain, the butterflies in the stomach and heart in your throat for nerves. We know what to

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  • Practice vs. Passion in Writing: assessing my growth as a writer

    In many ways, writing still feels like a need that’s intrinsic to my nature. But, external forces have been removed. Writing is no longer a forced activity rubrics and due dates, but a chosen form of expression.

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  • The Stayed Hand: when you can’t put your ideas to the page.

    I have drafts and plots for stories I want to write. They sit in their queue, waiting for me to pick them up, dust them off, and finish them. I have dreams for fairy tales, speculative fiction, suspense, and romance, all half-written with a clear road-map- but I can’t bring myself to take the final

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  • Half-Told Tales: My Incomplete Writing Projects

    Like many writers, I have a backlog of writing. My files and folders are stuffed with projects I’ve started, but abandoned at various stages of development. Short stories and novellas in many genres: speculative horror, suspense, fantasy, and romance, children’s books, and personal essays- all still waiting for their first draft mock-ups. In honor of

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  • “Don’t be a ‘writer’, be writing”. I love and hate Faulkner’s famous advice. I hate it because I know he’s right and I haven’t been writing much lately. Between craziness at work, home life, and my business- I am have almost no energy to be creative. At least, that is the excuse I’ve been making

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