One Day At A Time

One of my mantras when I’m working on long-term writing projects is a single word. Patience.  I mutter this to myself often as I’m writing through a first draft and, once that’s completed, when I have to type up whole novels written in longhand in notebooks. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of […]

Writing Through the Pandemic

So… how are you? I mean it. How are you? In my quiet household, where the animals don’t seem to be aware that anything’s wrong (except for Mowat’s amped-up need for evening cuddles as I watch The National), we are muddling along. Talking every day with my mom, texting with my mother-in-law who is in […]

What Happened When I Tried to Turn My Life into a Novel

I spent over a decade working on my book. “Working” may be the wrong word: I spent over a decade trying to make the book work. I only actually worked on it for the equivalent of a year during that time. The reason for this long, languishing creation period was simple: I wasn’t writing honestly. […]

Sticky

Once I coached a woman who could not bring herself to write. She spoke of her longing and of abstract story concepts but she didn’t jot down a word no matter what I suggested. Then, at the end of a couple of months together, her heart broke. Literally. She disappeared and when we finally reconnected, […]

Ramble

EDIT (03/16/2020): This group is now wide open to help bring together writers during these COVID-19 times of self-isolation… My creative and working life feels like a bit of a ramble sometimes. I mean, I’m walking a clear path, but I tend to branch off a lot. Grab that bit of sheep’s wool that’s tangled […]