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...
How do you decide what to write? I get this question a lot. I think people who are deciding if they want to write a book spend a lot of time thinking about the external landscape—trends, state of the publishing industry, what agents want, what’s hot on one bestseller list or another. And look....
Writing “success” doesn’t happen overnight. We all tend to get caught up in such a narrow view of success, and specifically this idea of it happening "overnight." Writers definitely experience this. We see the people on the NY Times bestseller list, hear about the new writer who got a...
One of my favorite business podcasters, Jenna Kutcher, who hosts the Goal Diggers Podcast, has this saying: Where the woo meets the work. In her words, it’s about honoring the woo, then following it up with the work. Meaning, putting the creativity crystal on your desk isn’t going to mean that...
Happy NaNoWriMo! It’s a writer’s favorite time of the year. November is National Novel Writing Month, the (somewhat insane) month where writers across the world decide to write a 50K word novel in 30 days. Yes, it sounds insane. But it’s also effective. Setting a goal like that is powerful....
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...
I’ve got a reputation for being pretty hard on myself. I know where it came from, of course. A lot of self-reflection, journaling and excavating moments of my childhood reminded me that my parents expected a lot from me. I was “the smart one,” a title that, while flattering, was also intimidating...
