When’s the last time you did anything to refill your creative well? Making art is active, and focused, and intentional, and draining. Tapping into your creative mind is tiring, though many of us don’t notice that we’re fatiguing until we’re lying face down like a stick of butter that’s been left out on the counter in August. Try scheduling activities into your life that will nurture your creative spirit.
There are a gazillion writing apps and programs out there in the digital world, some that cost money and some that are free. Of them all, I’ve tried a handful. However, after two years in grad school, chasing the dream of getting an MFA in creative writing, I’ve come to rely heavily on one in particular: …
Every morning, I wake up, get the coffee beans ground, get the water heating, and then I sit down and write for an hour. At the end of that session, I check my “session target” bar in Scrivener, and a satisfied warmth suffuses my brain. I’ve discovered a couple of things about writing first thing …
Writing is like baseball. Most of the time, you recognize the pitch coming in and you manage a solid single when you swing at it. Occasionally, you strike out. Every once in a great while, though, you hit a grand slam. Or, if you’re new at it, like me, you dream about hitting a grand …
This month’s IWSG post asks the question: What steps have you taken to put a schedule in place for your writing and publishing? After all, if we don’t make time for the things we love, we will never do them. Writing is no exception.
I’ve got a thirty-minute break before my next parent-teacher conference, so I thought I’d use this time to do some writing. I know I won’t be able to get any meaningful creative writing done, sandwiched as this moment is between long and stressful blocks of trying to calm down nervous parents and stressed-out students. My …
Aaaaaaaaaarrrgh! Life, my good man, please! Will you just chill out already? I mean, criminiddly, I am trying to be a writer over here! In all seriousness, though, I have not be getting words onto the paper of late, and it is starting to make me feel a little crazy. There has been a whole lot …
The Debate Rages On: Is NaNoWriMo a good thing or not? Emotions run high when this question is asked. I mean, folks get seriously heated. Fans of NaNoWriMo start heating the tar and gathering the feathers whenever someone suggests that maybe NaNoWriMo isn’t the best thing ever. Critics of NaNoWriMo sharpen their pen nibs in …
Yeah, Yeah, I know. We’re all busy. We all wear a lot of different hats in life. I teach, I write, and I parent. It doesn’t always happen in that particular order. Priorities shift daily. Time bleeds out of my as if I’ve severed some existential artery. Last night, I fell into bed at 9:00pm like …
It’s been my experience that a creative person’s goals–fragile, beautiful little things that they are–frequently crash headlong into the mercurial realities of life. This morning, as I sit at my kitchen table to do my morning pages, I can’t help but catch sight of the wall calendar opposite me and notice that August 28th is …