In her book Radical Compassion, Tara Brach talks about a Buddha statue that sat dull and covered in mud for many decades, if not centuries. Everyone that it was a dull statue. Nothing much to look at. Nothing to see there. And then there was an earthquake. Cracks...
One of the biggest frustrations that authors have is when the words won’t flow. Call it writer’s block or don’t. The truth is, staring at a screen or a piece of paper and not being able to write anything sucks. There are online arguments probably...
The way my writing day is structured I get two, sometimes three, opportunities to drop 1000 words on various projects. I like writing different projects every day. It makes my brain purr. I feel like I’m accomplishing a lot and even though the progress on each...
There’s a lot going on in the world right now. There’s the nonstop political shenanigans that give shenanigans a bad name, because those are supposed to be fun, right? There’s exploding diarrhea because who doesn’t want that in the heat of...
Sitting in a writing group meeting, knowing that you have years, decades even, more experience than the people in the room, and yet feeling as passed over as dried old turkey a week after Thanksgiving hurts. It creates grief. The never-ending spiral of “what...
In my last blog I talked about how the mind-body divide, or in today’s terms, the focus on work-life balance seems to have broken career balance. And as soon as I hit publish on that blog, I could hear the questions coming. If I’m not supposed to focus on...
The common way we think about work-life or life-career balance is that there is a time for “life” and a time for your career. And like that odd mixture of cranberry sauce and gravy at an (American) Thanksgiving plate, the two really shouldn’t meet....
I follow a lot of self-proclaimed author gurus and I’m noticing that a lot of them are pivoting away from faster writing and shorter times between releases and more toward trying to sell authors on creating a sustainable career and finding the elusive author...
I did an interview last week and was asked about writer’s block. Real solid, beat your head against the desk writer’s block. And the answer I gave during the interview has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. You see, I don’t...
While I don’t advise everyone to track their daily word count, for me it has been enlightening. With the exception of the times when I take a deliberate break from writing, such as what I’m doing the rest of this month to catch up on to do list things, it...