Meditation. Love it or swear you’re going to scream if you hear someone say the word one more time, right? I had a great meditation practice established for a long time. Fifteen or twenty minutes every day, sometimes even twice a day. I loved meditating. It made me calmer, helped me focus better, and expanded […]
I know, I know, you get back what you put out so I shouldn’t be calling February gloomy. But for cripes sakes, it kind of is. I mean, we’ve got the Donald, and here in Portland we’ve had so many ice and snowstorms I’ve lost count (give me plain old Oregon rain any day), and […]
Wherein I talk about what it takes to be a writer, in my humble opinion, anyway. To finish a book project, or even an article or short story. To get the book out in the world, either into the hands of an agent and editor, or publish it yourself, which is a whole other enterprise. […]
Hola! Its a beautiful Friday afternoon in Portland, Oregon, and I am posting the very first post on my new blog. Well, its not exactly new–just the design and the host (WordPress instead of Typepad). So, there’s a bit of a learning curve here and I’ll be playing around the next few weeks. But seeing […]
It is my pleasure and honor to offer you this interview with Sandra Pawula. Sandra writes one of my favorite go-to blogs, Always Well Within, where I find spiritual wisdom and inspiration. She's a writer herself, so everything she shares speaks to creatives. Sandra has a new e-course that starts September 9th. I'm planning to […]
What you put your attention on grows. It's that simple. So if you put your attention on how wonderful it is to write every day, that writing habit will grow. If you focus on how much fun it is to submit to agents (I'm feeling funny today), you'll do more of it. If you think […]
I finished going through the papers from long ago that had landed on the floor of my office, but yesterday I tackled another organizing project: office supplies. Read: journals. As in unused ones. I've got tons of them. After my initial foray into sorting them, I told my husband that if I ever uttered the […]
I'm finishing up Uncertainty, the book by Jonathan Fields, and last Friday, after I wrote about process visualization, I promised a post with another tip that'll help with your creativity. That tip is attentional training. As mentioned earlier, Fields likes to give fancy names to things we've all heard of and are familiar with. Thus, […]
I know. Meditation. Gag me. We're writers. Our heads are full of words and images. Our heads are supposed to be full of words and images so that we can transfer them to the page. But. The transferring to the page is often the tricky part. The place where we get hung up. Because we […]
In writing, repetition is often frowned upon because it is seen as a lack of cleverness, or perhaps laziness–couldn't you take the time to find a different word so you don't keep repeating the same one? Please, please, please can't you vary the length and structure of your sentences so as to avoid the mind-numbing […]
