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New Year: 2025
Welcome to 2025 everyone! We have arrived at one of my favorite times of year: a moment to take stock, evaluate, and plan ahead. I love this moment—which also comes around birthday times—because it helps me get my bearings. I get a chance to peruse my internal map, attempt to gauge the distance between where…
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The Revolution Will Be Stenciled: Making Art When It’s All Too Much
There are moments when the world feels too big, too vast, to imagine that an individual voice might matter. I find election years do that to me. Checking my phone feels like an act of courage (or idiocy) as I’m hit with this opinion or that as soon as I open an app. News and…
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New Year, New You, New School Supplies
Early September, Labor Day, has always felt more like the New Year to me than any actual new year. My birthday is only a couple months earlier, so I feel like I’m still new to my age, and school resolutions were always more powerful to me than New Year’s. After all, summer break meant I…
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In Which I Disagree With a Stephen King Narrator
I finished reading the first story in Stephen King’s newest collection, You Like It Darker. The story is about “Two Talented Bastids,” as the title so eloquently describes. These two bastid besties grow up in a small town in Maine. Around midlife, seemingly out of nowhere, their latent talents bloom, and they suddenly become wildly…
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The Insidious Nature of Staying in Your Lane
Often, when I need some time and space to just be quiet and think, I’ll drive. There’s a circuit I take which surrounds my house. Long stretches of road that go on for miles. Sagebrush, long grass, antelope, and herds of cows. Strand after strand of barbed wire and leaning metal posts. The stripe of…
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Cinnamon Roll Rising
NOTE: If you’re looking for recipes, you’re in the wrong place. 😉 So my friend Ali has been tackling a supernatural romance series and she mentioned that in her current research/reading the trope of the “cinnamon roll” is trending. Having never heard the term except in relation to delicious pastries, I did some googling, some…
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Rejection and I are Old Friends
We’ve all been there. We took a risk, put ourselves out there–whether it was a story submission, a job interview, a date request–and been told that most horrible of words: NO. If you’ve ever put yourself out there, or are considering putting yourself out there, or if you’ve decided you will never, ever put yourself…
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Handling Jealousy as a Creative Professional
I chose Colleen Hoover as my focus for the first quarter of 2024 because she was objectively successful. Millions of books sold, adored by fans, and a darling of both the traditional publishing and self publishing worlds. As I am also determined to be wildly successful, I chose to dive into Hoover before I read…
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Am I a Dictator?
(Not that kind of dictator.) My writing goals are insane this year. I want to write six new books in a new series as part of a rapid-release independent publishing project to launch next year. In researching the best ways to attempt this, I heard that the fastest writers dictate their books. So I figured…what…
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The Phenomenon that is Colleen Hoover
At a writer’s conference, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Writers House super-agent Daniel Lazar. During the talk, he was explaining what it was like to be an agent, and how tricky it was to pick authors to work with. Because not everyone can do it. He asked all the attendees to…
