Yesterday my daughter said, “I love how your hair sparkles!” Sparkling hair! It must be that amazing new conditioner. No, wait, I’m not using an amazing new conditioner. I glanced in the mirror. I looked like my normal self, no stray glitter from a craft project or anything like that. “Hmm. What do you mean?”…
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Ow: The pain of rejection
I got one of those lightning-fast rejections today that make you wince. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the black hole of pitching, where you send endless pleas for attention into an infinitely large universe and nothing comes back. So I appreciate something coming back. I just wish it wouldn’t come back so fast, so…
Trust your teacher
When I began training in the martial arts, one of the first things I had to learn and accept was that I had to trust my teacher. I didn’t know what was expected of me, and I certainly didn’t believe that I could do any of it. But my teacher thought I could learn…
Measuring Productivity for Writers
A couple of my recent posts on motivation dance around the idea of productivity when you’re trying to accomplish big goals. In these posts I talk about the importance of your attitude and your process, rather than focusing on the product. Still, we don’t start with page one of a book and not have the…
Big Projects and Productivity
A comment on a previous post points out that people sometimes get stuck on long projects and stall because they haven’t figured out the next step. “Write a book” seems a little daunting. You can’t get it done today. So you shy away from getting started at all. Productivity gurus talk about figuring out…
What makes us stay?
The other day, I made the mistake of saying the word “anywho” to a friend who is a lifelong New Yorker. If you’ve never heard this word, it means you’re not a midwesterner, and I can’t explain it. Anyway, my friend suggested that I should probably avoid such provincialisms in the future or else people…