While I was on hiatus from the blog, I was busy behind the scenes. The process of brainstorming content, creating a newsletter, and updating all of my old posts taught me valuable lessons about blogging and the overall direction of my writing life. Lesson 1: Have An Artistic Vision Based on brainstorming during the Pixels […]
conference
2016 Year In Review: Hopes, Revisited
Last year, on New Year’s Day, I wrote the following hopes for 2016 in my journal. I didn’t print them out or look at them again until this morning, when I was trying to figure out how to write this post, and decided to check back and see if I’d written anything at the start […]
Conference Recap, Big Questions
Before we get started, here’s a link to a recent post I wrote for my friend and DIY MFA co-staffer Sara Letourneau, entitled Why Creativity Is Essential For All Genres. I highly recommend subscribing to Sara’s blog! She does an amazing job of pulling back the veil on her fiction-writing process, giving her readers tips for […]
Finishing Draft 1: Then Vs. Now
Last Wednesday, I reached the end of Blizzard, draft 1. (For more details about the book’s plot and characters, return to this post.) I was powerfully reminded of the way I felt when I reached the end of draft 1 of Waist on the auspicious date of 12/12/12. I was exhilarated then; I thought I […]
2015 Writer’s Digest Conference Recap: DIY MFA love!
“I love this so much, I want to cry.” Those were the words running through my head all weekend, as I traversed the halls of the Roosevelt Hotel from conference session to keynote speech to networking event. Not the most poetic thought, maybe, but it echoed what was in my heart. I love writing, talking […]
The Purpose of Practice
As a music teacher, I am regularly told that my subject is less important and more expendable than other “core” subjects such as reading, math and science. Why? Well, because most music students don’t grow up to have careers in music. I question the validity of this point (does that mean Biology and Algebra were […]