If you are like more than half of the people in this country, you probably have a job that takes up forty or more hours of your week (cue Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”). As a school teacher, I am currently taking on an abnormal amount of work. Busy would be an understatement to describe my current situation, and one thing keeps getting put on the backburner… my writing routine....

Every writer I know has some trouble sharing their work with others. It’s easy to get lost in our insecurities and dwell on the “what ifs” of life. What if people hate it? What if someone makes fun of it? What if it’s so bad that my entire family disowns me? I can joke about these fears on paper, but in real life, they can be debilitating. Writing anxiety can...

I don’t know about you, but self-care can be a challenge for me.  It’s an oft-neglected part of our busy lives anyway, and then you add writing goals, and self-care moves ever further down the list of priorities.  For the sake of all of us (myself included!), I’m here today to share my best self-care tips for writers.  1) We’ll start with the basics.  Don’t compare yourself to other writers. I’m...

I’m just starting to get back to writing after a dry spell that lasted over a decade. I did write occasionally during that period of time, but I’m finding that I have a renewed sense of purpose and drive that I didn’t have before.  Because I interact with many writers, I have a feeling that more than one person reading this right now is either experiencing their own dry spell...

Ten years ago, I woke up with an idea. An idea I wasn’t sure how to make room for amidst other priorities. I wrote in starts and stops. Hills of progress. Valleys of neglect.  Until one day, I emerged with a 85,000-word first draft.  My process from blank page to first draft wasn’t pretty (or fast). Luckily, I learned a lot along the way. Most of which I gleaned from...

If you tell someone you’re writing a novel, I’d stake my fiddle leaf fig tree that you’ve heard one of the following statements: “Oh, I’m writing a novel too.” “I started writing mine five years ago…” “I know someone writing a novel. My (mom, uncle, friend, dog, ad nauseum…)…” You hear these less often: “I finished my first draft last week.” “I’ve been getting really productive feedback from my beta...

At the age of sixteen, I wrote my first novel.  After powering through an entire month of NaNoWriMo and snagging my hard-earned “winner” badge, I realized that it wasn’t the badge that had brought me so much satisfaction. Instead, it was the feeling of holding my printed draft in my hands for the first time. In that moment, I was a writer. I never questioned whether or not I made...

A fun game me and my fellow podcasting friends play involves yelling out a random phrase, then googling it. The goal is to find a podcast on that topic. I haven’t ever played a round where we couldn’t find an episode on some niche subject. Fireplaces, neurosurgery, fishing; you name it, there’s a podcast for it. Writing podcasts are one of my favorites of the niche community. I walk everywhere...