Wonderful Mediocrity I love setting goals. Don’t get me wrong; nice, fluffy, feel-good goals like: “someday I’ll try oil painting” or “someday I’ll get a book published.” But goals like that aren’t helpful. They do little more than convince me I’m going somewhere without giving me the means[…]
I’m a doodler at heart. What exactly does that mean, you ask? It means that I think the best when my hands are moving (knitting fulfills that need, too). It means I have a history of drawing in class so that I could better focus my listening. It means I get enjoyment from sketching, even[…]
Time is a commodity of which I never have enough. Maybe you’re like me. I am constantly pulled between opposing forces as they try to steal my time. There is always more to be done than I can squeeze into one day. And I’ve taken pains to pare down my life to just the basics,[…]
Hello, fellow Soldier. What’s that? You aren’t a soldier? I disagree. Waging War Every day is a battle if you are a Creative. All Creatives must wage war against the enemy known as Resistance. Some days he’s a pushover – you can stomp him to bits with bursts of creative energy. Other days, he’s a stalwart[…]
Inspiration is a tricky thing. I’ll always remember the night I finished my first novel. It was a meandering, unplanned, angsty beast I spent most of my high school career working on, and I really had no idea where I was going. Then, one Friday night, I watched Empire Records for the first time. As[…]
Two thousand ten was a great year. Including the completion of my first novel and winning National Novel Writing Month on a second book (oh yeah, and having a baby), I achieved many things in the realm of developing myself and my craft as a writer. But I’m hoping to make 2011 much bigger and[…]
Writing my first book was a huge rollercoaster of emotion. With no training, I jumped in head-first and just went for it. It took me nine months to birth the first draft and in that time, I grew dramatically as a person and found out what it really meant to be a writer. I learned[…]
A few weeks back, I talked about experiencing a surge of motivation caused by the pressure of writing fifty thousand words in thirty days, aka NaNoWriMo. Today I want to share with you the flip side of that intense commitment – the mid-month slump. Inspiration versus Hard Work In the beginning, I was writing in[…]