If you ask most professional writers, they’ll tell you they’ve been writing since childhood, and the same is true for me. I dreamed of writing a book and getting it published for almost as long as I can remember. But how do you actually go about writing a book? I had no idea… and it showed in my writing. For more years than I can honestly count, I worked on…
I wrote last week about how I hadn’t planned on becoming a writer, and how writing was something I came to after being unemployed for a long time. So already my path to publication was a little longer and had more forking paths than some people. I completed the rough draft of my novel in about six months in 2011, and I spent the next four years first learning how…
I’m so pleased to present Carole Stivers, our guest blogger this week! Carole is the author of The Mother Code, an exciting and fresh science fiction novel, which launches August 25th. About Carole Stivers Born in East Cleveland, Ohio, Carole Stivers received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She went on to post-doctoral work at Stanford University before launching a career in medical diagnostics. She now lives…
I am excited to introduce our guest author for this week, Alexis Marie Chute. Alexis is an award-winning author, artist, photographer, art curator, filmmaker, and public speaker. She has received over 40 noteworthy distinctions for her visual and literary work. Chute’s bestselling memoir, Expecting Sunshine: A Journey of Grief, Healing and Pregnancy After Loss, was a top Kirkus title of 2017 and received a plethora of other literary distinctions. The…
Recently, I read a post on someone who found out that not everyone has a running inner dialogue in their minds. I was as shocked as the original poster at this discovery. My mind has always been a chatterbox; I just assumed it was the same for everyone! My inner world is constantly questioning, observing, judging, apologizing, and taking stock. I’m like a ringmaster, struggling to bring peace to a…
I grew up very introverted, completely over sensitized to the world on a daily basis and retreating inside my head to cope. From ‘Baby Yoda’ me, till I was around 17, my personality type could be very easily summed up by the words “bookworm”. Books were my escape, my safety blanket, and my deepest friends. Looking back, it was my own form of obsessive coping mechanism. I was a depressed…
I am so very into being inspired. I love being exposed to new experiences, ideas, art, stories, sounds, tastes. I used to feel I could only be inspired by things when I felt safe. I felt like I needed to shut out others to find inspiration from within. While this is still true, as I can find inspiration in quiet contemplation, I’ve also found I can be very inspired when…
There are definite challenges to the path of being a creative writer. A lot of them are so widely agreed as horrible, that most humans are against the entire profession because of them! I love when I’ll meet a new human and I tell them I’m a writer, and they’ll immediately tell me how the have an idea for a screenplay or a novel and any day now it might…
Happy Holidays! Every once in a while a book comes around that gives you water in the middle of the desert. For me, and others I’ve spoken with, in 2019, Becoming by Michelle Obama was that book. Though it technically came out at the end of 2018, in 2019, this book was everywhere. When I read it at the beginning of the year, I felt like it was the black…
When I look back at my elementary school years, some of my fondest memories were the days when the box arrived from the Weekly Reader Book Club. The teacher would open it in front of the class and distribute what we had ordered weeks before. It was like having Christmas and my birthday rolled together month after month. I’d bring my books home and binge on Nancy Drew mysteries—The…
