You couldn't pay me enough to go back to age 20. There's something to be said for gaining at least some wisdom as you go. And as I've gotten older, I've stopped caring so much what other people think. But that said, if I could sit down with my 20-year-old self right on the cusp of one of the...
When I first heard the words “project manage" and "your writing” in the same sentence, my head almost exploded. I'm the kind of person who literally cries when faced with a complicated spreadsheet. The first time someone asked me about a pivot table, I almost had a heart attack. And no, I'm not...
Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s talk love affairs. Not the human kind, because those can so often be disappointing, right? No, let’s talk real love—our love affairs with our creativity. With our writing. I was doing a meditation this morning and the meditation teacher read a poem. It was about...
Once, in a job interview, I was asked how or when I knew that I could make a living as a writer. It wasn’t a question I’d thought about in advance. I could’ve answered in a multitude of ways, talked about my passion for books and making up stories and creating worlds that drew people in, made...
This is what I posted on my LinkedIn page to ring in the new year: Three things I'm NOT doing this year: Efforting (also known as making things harder than they need to be!) Overthinking Doubting myself I didn’t even think much about these things, honestly. I didn’t plan them. I didn’t spend the...
This past weekend was the New England Crime Bake. It’s a writer’s conference that’s local to the Boston area. It’s also a special conference for me, because it was the one I found when I first Googled “mystery writer conferences” more than 20 years ago when I decided that I was going to write...
How do you know if you have a creative block? It sounds like a simple concept. A variation of writer’s block, even. But where writer’s block is usually defined as unable to make progress on a writing project, I think of creative blocks a little differently. When the simple thought of putting a pen...
Have you ever really stopped and thought about what success means? Like, to you. Not to your mom, or your dad, or your spouse, or Instagram. For instance: Is it a fancy title? A lot of money? (Also, what's a lot? Have you thought about it? Hint: there’s no right or wrong answer.) Is it getting...
