Lately, I’ve been stuck in words. The right word, as a matter of fact. As some of you know, I’m studying Spanish, rather intensely, truth be told. I’m slowly moving away from being functionally illiterate in Spanish (where I know every word except the important one) and moving toward marginally literate in Spanish. But you […]
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I hit a perfect storm in June. I knew I was going to be behind by the time I hit the end of May. I had actually planned to be somewhat behind on various projects because I knew I had the summer to catch up. But I seriously underestimated the time it would take to […]
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I’m writing these posts in no particular order, just as the reasons come to me. And honestly, they’re everywhere. Because of last summer’s move, we reorganized our books. We are in a smaller space than we were in Oregon, so we got rid of a lot of our books—the ones we didn’t need for research […]
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For more than a decade, writers have asked me what they can do to sell their existing books. I always tell them to write the next book. Some writers don’t have time for promotion. Others don’t have the constitution for it. But all the ads in the world don’t work unless the writer has a […]
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I had two major challenges in 2021. The first was the stupid pandemic. I hadn’t realized how much of my brain it consumed. Even after I wrote the blog called “Focus,” I still wasn’t back 100%. At some point in early 2022, I clicked over to this: Covid will be ever with us, and I […]
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I’m writing this the week that Dave Wolverton died, a man most of you know as writer and teacher, Dave Farland. I first met Dave in 1987 and we’ve been friends ever since. As you’ll note, I’m having trouble with tenses, because to me, Dave is still around, even though he’s not. Another friend pointed […]
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I read a lot of articles and essays during the worst of the pandemic about the way that the Covid crisis was having an impact on our concentration. Most of those looked at folks who had actually had Covid, and how they should try to rebuild or survive their still-lingering illness. Others, though, focused on […]
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In the middle of our summer move, I was going slightly crazy. I had set up a lot of deadlines for the first time in years, and I was afraid I would blow all of them. I was truly out of practice at dealing with deadlines on the writing. I had been so burned out […]
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Heard from an old friend this morning, a hell of a writer, and one of the most together people I know. The email was a little sad, which makes sense as this damn pandemic continues, despite all our best efforts (or rather, some of us giving it our all). My friend mentioned, in passing, that […]
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I’m doing a lot of things here in Las Vegas that I only dreamed of doing when I lived in Oregon, especially small town Oregon. Sometimes I think I rolled myself into a little ball and cut out everything else. Some of that was health-related, some of it was the demanding job, but some of […]
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