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Work, Write: How to Nurture Your Writing and Still Get a Paycheck
Working is a reality in my life, and it will be for a very long time. I mean the 9-5 variety, specifically. There’s plenty of other work, too. But that’s the work that takes up the big bulk of my time and my brain. I’ve been working full time and writing for a long while, now. Before it was a traditional…
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An Image Post
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the…
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October and Pomegranates
I am thinking of my dear Aunt C a great deal today. I wrote two poems about the pomegranates that grow at her house, and I'm sharing them while I ruminate on the beauty, and darkness, that we find in October, that most brilliant of months.
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Writing with Outlines and Making Room for Unexpected Monsters
Glassmere marks my second real foray into a planned novel. The outline isn’t terribly strict, and it’s always changing and morphing. But it’s like this bright backbone I’m building around. For a seasoned pantser, this is a huge departure. What I like most about the outline, though, is that it’s not as rigid as I thought it’d be. Sure, there…
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Moving My Brain and My Stories, Too
Now that the office is finally set up in the new house, writing has begun again on Glassmere. Frustrating to take a break from something I’m enjoying so much, but there’re lessons to be learned there, too. The older I get, the more I realize that writing is… well, it’s about the writing. The other extraneous chaff is part of it…
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Do You Want to be my Alpha Reader?
If you follow me on social media, or anywhere really, you’ll note that I’m currently writing a magical realism novel called Glassmere. The elevator pitch is that it’s Downton Abbey meets Narnia. It’s set in the spring and summer 1914, and is the story of two generations of sisters (Eleanor and Julia who are in their late teens, and Alice and…
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Eating Authors over at Lawrence M. Shoen’s Blog
With a whirlwind trip to California (that included the worst airline experience to date, thanks United Airlines!) and the snowpocalypse in NC, I totally forgot to share this bit! I met Lawrence at Illogicon last year, and through the magic of Tsu (really, this isn’t a joke) he asked me to write for his blog series Eating Authors. Pretty much…
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Two feet forward & re-processing writing process
Timehop is a fabulous app. It’s really built on one hook: you want to see what you were up to in the past. So every morning, I open my app up and get windows into what I was doing one, two, three years ago. You get the drift. It’s often awash with cute pictures of my kids, plates of food,…
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On Achieving Writing Distance
Ever since I read Stephen King’s On Writing twelve years ago, I’ve been acutely aware of my biggest fault as a writer: my inability to achieve distance from my own writing. King talks about finishing a manuscript and then putting it away for a few weeks, letting it mellow a bit, in order to return to it with fresh eyes. But…
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On “failing” NaNoWriMo 2014
So even though I haven’t been posting here as much as I ought, I did post a series of meanderings over at Writer’s Digest over the NaNoWriMo insanity. The last post I somehow missed, but it’s live right here. You can click through all the other bits I shared from that final post, but I wanted to share the post…
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Introducing Two Brain Space
So, in what’s probably not a surprise, I’m going to be doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m in an even-year pattern, as it goes. But what is a surprise is that I’m doing it with Jonathan Wood, my good friend and fellow writer. It’s, in a word, spiderpunk. If you want to follow what we’re doing, head on over to…
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Winner of the Flashy Things and Other Updates
Leave it to me to spend a week overhauling my entire website, and then stop posting. It’s been a busy few months, and after February’s Pilgrim of the Sky marathon, I took a bit of a break (and I’d like to think deservedly so). But I haven’t been absent from writing entirely! I’ve been thinking a good deal about a…
