Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. – John Updike I work on a weekly podcast with a friend in the cracks. By that, I mean I never schedule time to work on the show — I only work on it when it crosses my mind and I have a […]
Archives for September 2015
Writing Reality Checks
[First thing: If you’ve never read Richard Nash’s What is the Business of Literature? you should check it out. It’s a free e-book, and I’m sure it can be found online. Yep — right here.] * * * Richard Nash’s “What is the Business of Literature?” is one of the best things I’ve ever read […]
Not About Lumberjacks
This post is not about lumberjacks. That would be silly, to make this a post about lumberjacks… Who would do such a thing? * * * I recently mentioned the goal of The Juggling Writer has always been this: To keep writing at the front of my mind by writing about it, and hoping it […]
To Never Be There At All
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. – Henry David Thoreau * * * I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a certain appeal to stepping away from all modern things, walking into the hills, and being silent for the rest of my life. But […]
Year Six
I’m always fascinated by the way writing projects change with time. For me, only short stories usually turn out as originally perceived. Novels change radically over the course of writing. Entire story lines and characters are dropped; in some cases, you see a better way of presenting everything, and early drafts don’t resemble the final […]
Three Days Gone
There are just a few more hours left in this three-day weekend. Tomorrow, it’s back to work and dropped into the madness of a major software release. Earlier today, I wrote about how writing is work. Not the hardest work I’ll ever do, but it definitely takes an effort. It’s not something I have to […]
Writing is Hard Work, But…
This Brain Pickings piece from April seems fitting for Labor Day in the states. In it, Cheryl Strayed says of writing: Writing is hard for every last one of us… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. […]
The Voices in My Head
Have you ever given much thought to the voice you hear inside your head when reading to yourself? When I read to myself, I don’t totally hear my own voice in my head — just an approximation. I hear the voice I’ve always heard in my head; I suppose it is a representation of me […]
A Light in the Dark
It’s quiet out there right now. It’s been quiet for hours and there are still hours of quiet to come before light breaks and the day begins. That’s what happens when you wake up at 2:30 in the morning and think, “I can go back to sleep for a few more hours, or…I can get […]
My Writing New Year
Day job work has been busy this summer, so I set aside the second draft of the current novel and tinkered with the last novel I finished. I never gave it a fair run with submission, so a little tightening was in order before putting it back out there. That novel is ready, and September […]
Ambient Noise for Writing
As a kid, making sure my feet were covered with my blanket made me feel safe from monsters that lurked at the foot of the bed. Making sure the blankets were pulled up around my neck ensured nothing would open a jugular vein and drain me as I slept. But there was something even more […]
An Idea
I started The Juggling Writer almost six years ago. There have been times I’ve written an entry a day for a complete month. Other times, especially in the last year or so, updates are not as frequent — sometimes not even a single entry in a month. My goal was three updates a week in […]
The September Silence
A good friend has dubbed it “The September Silence” — that time each year that I take a social media break in order to pretend the weather is cooler in Texas and turn my focus even more toward writing. At 11:57 p.m. on August 31, I logged out of all social media apps. And just […]