There are times when it is impossible to get things going. Maybe you’re tired, having personal problems, overwhelmed or simply worn out. Me, I’m tired this week. Tired of being sick, that is. It’s times like this that I realize just how much I’ve got going on and how little spare time I have. That extra nap because I’m sick really cuts into the productivity. A good example of this is last night. I got home around 9:00 PM from a work function. I was struggling to stay awake (earlier in the day, I nodded off in the dentist’s chair). I could have spent 30 minutes writing or editing or proofing one of my projects. Instead, I went to bed. […]
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Why Podcasting Your Work Can Be Good
I was thinking about my writing and my podcasting the other day and I came to realize how much benefit my writing actually gets from being podcast. It might stem from that advice you hear many professional authors give to “read your work out loud”, but there are definite positive outcomes to doing it: You end up with a much cleaner manuscript. That is a direct advantage to podcasting. I know, when I did GalaxyBillies, I would take a scene that I thought was pretty clean, especially the dialogue parts, and find little niggly errors that interupted the flow. I was able to clean up many of those problems during recording. Now that I’m preparing GalaxyBillies for submission, I’m amazed at […]
Read moreWriting Shouldn’t Be a Solitary Activity
In my early writing days I believed that it was just me and the words. No one else would ever be involved. I was totally alone. I’ve since learned that writing doesn’t need to be so solitary. True, there are times when it should be just you and the keyboard, but there are many times when you should be around and involve other people. For example. critiquing and feedback of your work – I have heard the opinion that a writer must write a million words before they have anything worth sending out. I would argue that a million words without any outside scrutiny doesn’t improve one’s writing much at all. The feedback around what works and what needs work […]
Read moreTis the Season
Most of us have probably watched a holiday special of one kind or another. When I was a kid, that holiday special was always “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. Okay, I’ll admit it, I still watch “Charlie Brown Christmas” every year, even now. There are lots of other holiday specials out there too. “Star Wars Christmas” comes to mind as a particularly… well let’s just say memorable to be charitable. The Muppets have a couple and pretty much every cartoon out there has at least one. I even saw “Ice Age Christmas” in the stores the other day. Yes, I bought it and it is pretty funny. All these specials got me thinking about why their creators did them in the […]
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