This time of year is usually when a friend and I plan our annual writing retreat. We didn’t go anywhere last spring because…well…a worldwide pandemic kinda got in the way. And while my friend (who quit corporate life to become a nurse) is vaccinated and I get the first round tomorrow, it’s still not likely […]
On the Craft of Writing
Over the years, I’ve gotten rid of several bookcases worth of books. Despite those purges, I still have three shelves full of books about writing craft. I think I keep most for the sake of nostalgia, but some — especially style guides and books about grammar — are things I return to now and then. […]
The Problem with Targets
A disclaimer: This is not an entry in which I set out to make the argument that targets are inherently terrible. It’s great to have goals…at some point, you have to look forward and say, “I want to reach that point!” But for many, targets (and the ways to hit them) become almost more important […]
The Year That Was…
And so we come to the end of not just another year, but one of the years! It’s not a year I’d hope to repeat, but it was not without its moments. Obviously, the big thing was the pandemic and just…all that out there! (You know what I mean.) For me, it was a year […]
A Matter of Trust
The other morning, I read this essay by Hilary Mantel about writers learning to trust themselves. It’s full of gems like this: You must recognize, though, that once you enter this life, you are at the disposal of your book around the clock. And there are no holidays. And this: Writing is a long game […]
The Return (To Social Media)
The annual social media break is almost done — tomorrow I return to it all. It started years ago when I mentioned I was considering stepping away a bit, which quickly escalated to dares from friends committing me to 101 days off of all social sites. The September tradition continues each year for me, with […]
On Limitations
[I wrote this 10 days ago and guess I didn’t set it to publish. Still holds up, so here it is…] * * * [The idea for this entry came from this Muddy Colors entry by Justin Gerard about his ideal art space. The gist: he has a fancy desk, but he usually does his […]
Year Eleven
Eleven years ago today I started The Juggling Writer. It’s changed quite a bit since this first entry. I don’t post as much as I once did. Gone are lists and things that were more, well…bloggy. It’s now a place where I share whatever comes to me (when I have time to post). The Goal […]
Sometimes You Just Know…
I’ve been on an earlier-than-usual morning schedule, getting up around 4:00 a.m. to read and write. It doesn’t hurt that with the arrival of September, North Texas has been unseasonably cool and cloudy and rainy. (By “unseasonably cool,” I mean lows in the 70s and highs in the low to mid 80s…with clouds.) Friday morning, […]
The Way We Talk
The two worst years of my life were junior high school. (More than the years in which close relatives died; more than the year I found out a brain tumor blew up in my head and was bleeding into itself and making me go blind in my right eye.) Those two years in junior high […]
September Silence 2020
It’s that time again: September, when I take a month-long social media break and focus on writing. A friend dubbed it “The September Silence,” and it’s a fitting name because that’s what I seek this month each year: a quieter time to fall into one of the things I love most in life. While September […]
Reading for Thought
This morning during breakfast, I read this article about what it means to teach high school writers about being published. There was one line, from a student working on a literary publication for high schoolers, that particularly hit me: Editing for Polyphony forced me to slow down. I began to realize that previously, my eyes […]
Fantastic Writing
When many hear the word fantasy to describe books, they think about swords and sorcery. And sure, there are the obvious stories: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, A Song of Ice and Fire (the series Game of Thrones is based on), and The Chronicles of Narnia, but fantasy is also Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Audrey […]
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