It’s Tuesday, November 15, 2016. November is half over, and so is NaNoWriMo. Once again it’s National Novel Writing Month, and I’ve vowed to write 50,000 words by November 30. So far, I’ve written just over 10,000, and the jazzy graph of my statistics on the NaNo website predicts that at the rate I’m going,… [Read More]
Block Busting in the merry month of May
It’s just over a month till my workshop at the East Greenbush Library on June 4th. Here’s the description I sent for their newsletter: BLOCK BUSTING: HOW TO BREAK THROUGH THE BARRIERS THAT KEEP YOU FROM WRITING Writer’s block afflicts every author sooner or later. If you’ve ever found yourself paralyzed, staring at an empty… [Read More]
Wanted: Guest Bloggers!
Calling all writers—how would you like to be a guest blogger on this site? And how would you like to host me on yours? Beginning Friday, April lst, I plan to start featuring fellow authors on a weekly basis. This spring I’ve vowed to ramp up my online presence so as to spread the… [Read More]
Fear and habit: my biggest writing bugaboos
Monday, March 21 Block Busting: Blasting through the Barriers to Creativity. That’s the catchy title I came up with for a workshop I’ll be delivering at least twice in the coming months: once for the Hudson Valley Writers Guild in June, and once for the Capital Region chapter of the Romance Writers of America in… [Read More]
A lonely birthday marred by murder of my favorite soap opera character
It’s not often a man strikes up a conversation with me in a bar, but then it’s not often that I find myself alone at a bar in a strange town where I know no one.* New York City doesn’t count—I met my husband at a bar there over 40 years ago, Max’s Kansas City,… [Read More]
Real-life soap drama shatters idyllic writing retreat
“Wherever you go, there you are.” That’s the most significant lesson I brought home from my week at a writing retreat in the Berkshires the last week in July. You can change your surroundings, plop yourself down in an idyllic setting with maximal solitude and minimal distractions, but it’s fiendishly difficult to jettison your habitual… [Read More]