My birthday is the 18th of March. The anniversary of my father’s death is the 19th of March. This one-two punch often catches me off-guard, a double-whammy of anxiety and guilt that throws me off my game despite my belief that I’m feeling fine. As mentioned in the authors note for this week’s Saturday Morning […]
One of my favourite pages from Raymond Chandler’s notebooks, where he plans out a list of similes and descriptions that will later find their way into books. There’s similar lists scattered through the notebooks where he describes outfits, makes a note of potential titles, or golden comebacks for his dialogue. Once used, he’d go back […]
This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in: Getting up and journaling to park ideas; Getting up and writing directly into the computer; Getting up and doing the day’s […]
My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there. Our kitchen is a disaster zone […]
Elizabeth George writes a journal for every novel, logging thoughts, ideas, and problems before she starts her writing day. Every day, she runs through the same pattern: read an entry from an old journal from previous novels, then write a new entry about the book she’s currently working on. This habit gives her the scope […]
Some weeks, everything works smoothly. You stick to your routine, your projects progress smoothly, your business runs like clockwork and delivers, just as it should. Some weeks, everything is chaos. Work demands sudden and necessary stretches of overtime that throw your routine into chaos, just as deadlines come due on other projects, and your support […]
Last year I did a new cover for Alan Baxter’s Shadow Bites: A Horror Sampler, a free bundle of stories and novel excerpts for folks who’d like to get a taste of Alan’s work. It’s a project from a longer conversation Al and I were having about title development, the stuff we’ve both been doing […]
Most days, I’m faking it here on the blog. My mission statement is simple—show up every day and put the most interesting insight I have into the world—but at least half the time I show up searching for something to be interested in or something useful to say. Some days, I’m less interested and more […]
I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch […]
Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps. Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find […]
Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release. The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we […]
Every December, around this time, my blog goes a little crazy as folks discover the What Writers Out To Know About Die Hard series of posts and start asking particularly sensible questions like, “wait, we’re only halfway through, were’s the rest of the series?” and “so you’re going to finish writing this, right?” And much […]
