Creative Coaching & Manuscript Development
Do you get in your own way as a writer? Here’s a guest post I wrote for publishing mastermind Jane Friedman’s blog about that stuff. It’s based on my new book, FLOAT • Becoming Unstuck for Writers, and walks through some of the ways we can interfere with our own work. Knowledge is power, right? And perspective helps a lot. Stephen King explains the creative person’s priorities
Early one spring morning three young men came to my house as agreed to put some plants into the ground. It was a lovely cool sunny day, and I felt glad to be welcoming some new life to our family’s little piece of Charlottesville, Virginia. I liked my choices. I remembered feeling good the day that I made the decisions and negotiated with the owner of the landscaping company
When I was a girl, my parents took me to visit some friends of theirs. It was the height of summer, clear and hot, when we arrived at their place in Wisconsin on Lake Michigan. Our hosts took us to the lake, and its rocky edge. I went wading to cool off. Then the strangest thing happened. After I took one step with each foot,
This is the story of how I got the energy I needed to get unstuck so that I could finish my book about becoming unstuck. You can’t make this stuff up. Sometimes the timing just works out Take this past weekend. I was enjoying the end of 2016’s Virginia Festival of the Book, Charlottesville, VA’s annual bookfest, dedicated to readers and authors and the people
I ordered a tech doodad from Amazon for my office here at Chenille Books. It cost $40, and would solve a problem. No big deal, right? About 5 or ten minutes to install it, and I’d be off and running again, better than ever. Hardly worth mentioning, right? Except when it didn’t arrive. I investigated, the way you do when something doesn’t go as planned.
So, there you are – You have a deadline, you are responsible, things have gone horribly wrong, and you’re doing your best not to just collapse in a puddle or starting ranting or panicking. Yeah, that feeling. Impending meltdown Okay, everyone, breathe deeply, come back to the present moment, and remember you are here now, not in that bad place. I was in that bad
A few years ago, I needed an office. Not long before, I’d moved to a new part of the country, set up a lovely office in my home for a while as I got settled, but it just wasn’t working any more. I had outgrown my safe comfortable space at home. I needed to work in a central location, have meetings, set up the computer, the
“Let’s do something interesting, like go to a playground!” I’m famous in my family for having said this as a pre-schooler, at the end of a long day in Mexico City. I’d been slogging around under the bright sun with my older siblings and parents. “Interesting” – to them – meant museums and palaces and cathedrals and such. We spent most of each year in America’s
Way-back Decades after a bad experience, I found myself thrust into another bad situation and a funny thing happened. This recent bad situation threatened to take me back – all the way back– to the responses that had served me as a young person in trouble. I was being trapped inside something out of date yet still powerful. I saw for that moment that all
Read how a library system encourages local writers with opportunities every week.
