Christmas Break

Merry Christmas and Happy Whatever-You-Celebrate to all! I’m taking a two-week break for the holidays; your next post will be January 7.

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Ideas and plot-noodling

Deep Lurker wanted to know what my ideas look like when I come up with them, specifically whether they’re just concepts or whether they have skeletal plots attached. Unsurprisingly, the answer is “It varies.” The slightly longer answer is “It varies A LOT.” To give you a

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Terror and dreams

Still with the process questions, starting with “What in the writing process TERRIFIES you (gives you bouts of anxiety)…and how do you push through it? For example, a blank page is both terrifying and exciting at the same time…” I think I spent ten minutes staring at

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Fermentation

I suspect that I shouldn’t have been surprised when my request for blog topics netted several about my process and career, but I was. The first one I’m going to deal with was about letting projects “ferment” and its implied negative effect on productivity and the writer’s

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Attitude

I feel like I keep coming in fourth at the Olympics. – Tiana Smith Trying to break into publishing is a time-consuming and deeply discouraging process. It always has been. There is little that can make someone feel as unappreciated and untalented as a string of form

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Resistance and Catastrophes

Thank you all for your input; I’ll try to get around to everyone’s suggestions in the relatively near future. I’m going to start with a post about getting stuck, because the first two suggestions were both aspects of that and I haven’t written about it for a

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Writing is like Weather…

For those who don’t know, I live in Minnesota. The weather here is a perennial topic; the news reports the temperature every hour on the hour, and every fifteen minutes (it seems like) when it’s particularly unusual. People talk about the weather constantly. Yesterday, I overheard at

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