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
Read more →One of the perennial questions every professional writer gets is, “How do you find time to write?” One of the common answers to that question is, “You don’t find time. You make time. People can always make time for what they love to do.” Followed by a
Read more →Every time I talk to a new group of would-be writers, one of the inevitable questions is “How do you find time to write?” There is no good answer to this question, because there is never enough time to do everything—the things one must do (eat, sleep,
Read more →Probably the second most common question established writers get is “How do you find time to write?” If the writer is known to be a full-time writer, it’s usually phrased as “When you had a day job, how did you…” but it’s still the same question. These
Read more →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
Read more →When Dorothy asked about reposting my Hat Lecture, I realized that I hadn’t done an updated version since 2011. So here is a revised version (or you can just go read the original one, if you’d rather). The original Hat Lecture focused on the fact that a
Read more →One of my writer-friends, back when she had several toddlers and a day job to fit writing around, used to say that no one else will defend your time for you. You have to do it yourself. Which means you have to make writing one of your
Read more →One of the persistent questions writers get is “Where do you find the time?” This ignores two basic things: first, nobody finds or saves time, really. We all have 24 hours a day, which arrives one nanosecond at a time at the same pace (though how we
Read more →There’s a joke I heard once, about a man who prayed fervently for forty years that God would let him win the lottery. Finally one night as he was offering his prayer once again, a voice came out of the air above him and said, “Look, I
Read more →
