What Unemployment Taught Me About Writing

I, and many college graduates in 2009, didn’t expect to graduate into a world with no jobs, and yet we did.  I was, perhaps happy for awhile.  We had a savings at the time, and Ryan hadn’t yet lost his job.  I watched way too much Buffy, lived off of yogurt and farmer’s market berries with iced coffee while writing all day and I should have been happy.   I should have used the...

What College Taught me About Writing

I, naturally, chose a writing and thinking heavy major in college.  I loved professors best who made me question all of my assumptions about myself and my world. These skills, like a good book, open the mind to see from new perspectives.   What this taught me was to strive for newness.  Freshness.   Anthropology, my major, introduced me to other ways of living,thinking, structuring...

Why I Write

If you ask a writer why they write you’ll get a million responses that are likely to reduce to a simple “because I must.”  But why?   If you asked me why I wrote when I was eleven and had discovered the desire, the need to write, my response would have been: “Because the characters in...

A Return to Blogging

My return to blogging is due to a sort of re-commitment to my writing as a career.  It isn’t that I exactly lost focus on it as such, but that I had some shaky years in there and had to immerse myself in fiction writing to survive them.  This mode of writing, blogging,  while I tried...

Endings Blogfest! How do you end a novel?

Thanks L.G. Keltner for hosting "The Endings Blogfest!"  And congrats to her on the 2nd anniversary of blogging. So what do I think about writing endings? I am obsessed with the right endings.  I wrestle with the endings to my projects for months, and often fixate on them while writing...

Insecure Writers' Group January 2014: Genre

   This is my first post of the year!  Sorry for the delay... there were colds, Nanowrimo and too much work in November and December. That said, sharing my goals for the year and my fears about them is the best start to a new year of blogging.  That said, be sure to check out the...

IWSG Post: Uncertainty in Revision

I have had so may insecurities the past few years, and a few successes.  The Insecure Writers' Support Group is the place to vent them, to read others' opinions, feelings, successes, insecurities, and to just generally share in the ups and downs of writing and publishing.  Participants post...