The Dreaded Writer’s Block

Everyone agrees that writer’s block has something to do with not writing, but exactly what counts as writer’s block varies wildly. Some think writer’s block is anything at all that results in not-writing (including having a hangover or deciding they’d rather go to the beach today than

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Room in your head

The holiday season is now officially in full swing. Around here, it starts slowly, a bit before Halloween, then ramps up gradually until just before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week is a steep climb full of preparations for either going somewhere to celebrate or hosting a celebration, and after

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Job list…

One of the things it’s easy to lose sight of is that “writing is a solitary business” has a lot of implications besides “it means you spend a lot of time sitting alone at your computer writing stuff.” Among other things, it means that everything comes down

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Fragile stories

After doing this for as long as I have, I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly all writers have a point in their process where their story is fragile. It’s a different point for every writer, and sometimes different stories become brittle at different points, unexpectedly. A

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Why I’m Not At Work Today…

Here, belatedly, is why you don’t have a normal scheduled blog post today. For the last six months, one of my sisters and I have been planning a train trip from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to LA, LA to San Francisco, San Francisco to Portland, and Portland

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Not a waste of time

I’m out of questions for the time being, so we’re back to my random musings on writing in general. Back when I was a beginning writer, I had a horror of “wasting writing time” by writing stuff that wasn’t actual pay copy. If it wasn’t intended to

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