Creative Coaching & Manuscript Development
Come to the Charlottesville Book Fair on Saturday 18 November Visit the Charlottesville Book Fair on the Saturday before the (US) Thanksgiving holiday weekend. I’ll be there with copies of my writer’s handbook, FLOAT • Becoming Unstuck for Writers. Get your copies signed in plenty of time to wrap them up for holiday gifts. And wait, there’s more! Introducing a New FLOAT Item! And – ta-daaahh!
I’m happy to share here my recent guest post for publishing guru Jane Friedman‘s blog. Paying attention to your public persona as a writer is a valuable undertaking for all writers. Even writers who are starting out can benefit from noticing which parts of their entire personality and self they want to present to the world. It can feel good to recognize that a lot
At the end of my recent guided self-study course for writers, 30 Days to Becoming Unstuck, I delivered on a promise I made early in January: in response to students’ comments, I’d create a new FLOAT tool for them. Well, now it’s time for the big reveal. Here’s what I gave my students, and I hope it is useful. I call it Eight Feet Ahead:
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
