The title is not a rhetorical question – as I track my writing hours and achievements over the course of 2016, the question of what constitutes a good day is starting to become intriguing. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week. When I started this year, I had a rough goal I wanted to hit: […]
ONE: MASLOW THE FUCK OUT OF IT My friend Laura Goodin has a saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Actually, that could be a lie. She has something similar to this, but I can’t remember if I’m inserting the profanity or the profanity was there when she deployed it in our most recent conversations. If […]
Let’s not dance around this fact: there are works I have out there, in publishing land, that I am less proud of than others. No, I will not tell you which ones. No, I will not confirm your guesses. No, it’s probably not the work you’re thinking about. In public, you try not to denigrate […]
This post is inspired by two separate things. The first is an article about kicking your year off right that a friend of mine linked to on Facebook, which advocated a handful of things to do in the early days of 2016 that would level-up your coming year. It was a solid article – I could see […]
I’m not making resolutions this year. I’m not making big, large-scale writing goals outside of the general idea that I’d like to write more and I’m going to start paying attention to what that actually looks like. What I am doing is establishing four basic tenets that govern my year. In essence, this ties back […]
There are two ways to look at my weekend. First, there is the I wrote nothing approach, where I look at the zero in both my word count and time at keyboard columns and curse myself for my lack of forward momentum. Second, there is the I wrote nothing on my current project approach, which takes […]
The great thing about being a writer: everything is the basis for a story, one way or another. It’s also the worst thing about being a writer. In fact, it kinda sucks. The tendency to extrapolate a narrative out of isolated incidents means that your head will be filled with chaos, especially once you move […]
Writers talk about failure a lot. They gather together to talk about the long roads they had to hoe in order to get their books published. They talk about the inevitable rejection letters, which arrive and keep on arriving and do not let up if you are doing your job remotely correctly. We like the […]
I’ve recommended Todd Henry’s book The Accidental Creative to dozens of people over the last few years. It’s a phenomenal book for re-thinking your approach to creative industries, and it appeals to any number of friends who have struggled with productivity systems that don’t account for the rhythms of creative life. That said, there are always […]
Another day, another terrifying number of people showing up to read Tuesday’s post about wasting time as a writer. I think it’s the first thing I’ve ever written on this site that got more views the day after it was posted than it did on the first day. This means I’m still brooding on the whole writing advice […]
So, having established that I don’t know shit about writing and publishing, I figure it’s worth talking about filtering the great swathes of writing advice out there. And, more importantly, how to figure out if a particular bit of advice is actually going to be useful to you. I mean, there is a whole bunch […]
A whole bunch of people showed up to read yesterday’s post. Like, four times as many people than would ordinarily read this blog. More of you this morning. This makes me very happy, but also extraordinarily nervous. Because, here’s the thing: I know fuck all about writing and publishing. I mean, I know some stuff, but in […]
