It is my favorite day of the year. (Yes, even more than Halloween, despite what I have may have said in the past.) And as I’m a firm believer in setting goals, especially New Year’s Day goals, I wanted to make this Five Links Friday one focused on setting and keeping goals. Enjoy! 1. Don’t […]
Five Links Friday 12/11/15
It’s Friday! Let’s get right to it… 1. K.M. Weiland has a nice post at her awesome blog looking at anti-climatic endings, which are a problem we all face every now and then in our writing. 2. We all get angry sometimes, especially us writers who are trying to balance our writing with our family […]
When should you give up your dream and stop writing?
My wife and I were having a jovial conversation the other day about the usual stuff (i.e., how busy and exhausted we are) and I said that if I didn’t believe I would eventually make writing to the point where I can do it full time, that I would have quit a long time ago. […]
If you don’t have time to read…
That’s a pretty well-know quote from Stephen King’s book on writing (aptly titled: On Writing.) If you take that statement at face value, it isn’t really saying anything special, just that reading is important and if you don’t read a lot, you won’t become a very good writer. But if you look into the deeper […]
Nab your first publishing credit
Writing is hard. Getting anyone to read your writing is even harder and getting anyone to pay you for your writing is the hardest. With that said, I’ve managed to do it a few times, so I’d like to share some quick advice on how to get your first short story published. Let’s start with […]
Feeling Overwhelmed?
In a recent post at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers blog, Patricia Stoltey asked: What if You Want to Quit Writing? She asks in the article, What if you haven’t achieved as much as you’d hoped, or worse, you’re just beginning and are feeling overwhelmed and suicidal? While I rarely, if ever, feel anything remotely […]
A goal without a ________ is just a daydream.
Regular readers of this site will know that I like to preach the importance of setting concise, written goals, both in the short-term and long-term. I personally write best if I set a daily writing goal, whether that be a word count, a scene, a blog post, or whatever. I also set monthly and yearly […]
Staying positive when things are crazy
So, yeah…the baby and the one-year-old (and sometimes the three-year-old) bawled all evening while my wife and I tried to take turns watching them while the other worked frantically on cleaning up the kitchen and picking up the million or so toys that keep mysteriously finding their way out of the kids’ rooms. And the […]