To understand what I am about to write, you need to understand that I am the adult child of two alcoholics. I’ve had tons of therapy to deal with my hugely destructive upbringing, so I know what triggers me. 2020 triggered me—of course. We all had to deal with things from deaths to illness to […]
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In late April, Dean and I started planning for a reopened society. We plotted our lives, the things that needed to be done for our individual businesses, and then for WMG Publishing. Finally, we got to the workshop planning. I wanted to start in-person workshops in the fall. I looked at the vaccination rates here […]
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The other day, I had a meeting in someone else’s office. Dean and I both walked in and immediately got enveloped in some kind of horrid fragrance. We were wearing masks, thank heavens. I immediately asked the woman we were meeting if we could go into the hallway of the building or onto a balcony. […]
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I wasn’t going to write much more on fear-based decision-making after the last post, “Fear And All Writers.” I figured I’d said what I needed to, even if the end of the series was (in my opinion) a bit lacking. Then I saw an opinion piece on Bloomberg, thanks to my Twitter feed. What caught […]
Continue ReadingWe had a surprise move in June. We found a wonderful place and decided to go for it, just like most of America, it seems. So we spent a few weeks shuffling things around. I ended up reading bits and pieces of novels, unable to concentrate. Really didn’t finish much, which is on me. July […]
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Here’s the toughest post and the easiest post at the same time. Because we writers are a fearful bunch. Maybe it’s because we live in our heads all the time. We make things up for a living, so that habit bleeds into our lives. Most of us keep that part of ourselves under control. We […]
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I’m putting up this post in the middle of the fear sequence as it appears on my website, not because the post fits in the fear cycle, but because I don’t want to monitor the news for weeks to see what, if anything, has changed. On June 9, here in the States, Democrats in the […]
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When I started these posts, I mentioned that the most fearful part of our industry is the movie/TV industry. With so many jobs and so much money at stake, only a handful of people seem capable of making decisions in that industry, and even they do so with great fear. The most courageous part of […]
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The other day, I got an email from a writer friend who was about to give advice to one of their friends. Seems that friend had a niche how-to book for parents who are dealing with a certain kind of health issue. My writer friend asked me, Is there any reason for this person to […]
Continue ReadingI had a lot of unfinished, unsuccessful reads this month. I moved some of my books around and found a romance novel I’d bought by a favorite writer. I’d picked the book up more than a decade ago, when I was getting everything she wrote. This one was her first novel, I think, and ooooh, […]
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