Lately, I keep telling my children to “Just do the thing in front of you.” We started homeschooling again and have been in that transition from summer-I-can-do-whatever-I-want back to school-and-mom-has-a-busy-schedule-planned. My TV-deprived kids are constantly coming up with new ideas for what we can do after school before we’ve even opened a book. So I [...]

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You’ve spent weeks, months, years writing your novel. You’ve listened to your characters. Told their stories. Described their hometowns, their friends, their troubles.
Then you took a close look at your words to make sure they were the exact ones you wanted. Made sure the verbs were active and descriptive. You took out your highlighters and [...]

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Before I get started with my blog this week I just have to talk about WriteOnCon! Were you one of the 11,000 attendees of this grassroots conference?!?
WriteOnCon was the first annual online kidlit conference held Aug 10-12, hosted by a group of authors who met online. Even if you don’t write kidlit or YA you [...]

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Part 1 of the Writer’s Routine: Finishing
Sitting down to write my blog this week, I thought about the saying that performance in any sport is 80 percent mental. So, I surfed around trying to find out from where the quote originated, and stumbled across something even more interesting: the 4 C’s of sports psychology, as [...]

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Looking back over the past 100 weeks of my blogs, I discovered a pattern. Even though we set the topics as a group, I can still manage to swing my focus over to:
Getting serious about writing.
Finding time to write / Writer moms.
Giving Pep talks.
Yeah, it is all about me and my hang-ups! So here are [...]

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I’ve been reading a book that I don’t like. At this point in my life, being very aware that time is limited, I would normally walk away from a book such as this. But, I’m curious about how the author crafted the theme. She’s done a really good job with an unusual topic and I [...]

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I’m convinced that a writer takes a vacation quite differently than most people (photographers and other artists notwithstanding.)
Planning: If at all possible, the writer will finagle an entire family vacation around the future setting of her next book. No matter if the book takes place in the distant reaches of the earth, or simply one [...]

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Part 3: Daydreaming for Encouragement.
If daydreaming for ideas is the writer’s bread and butter, daydreaming for encouragement is the writer’s heartbeat. If a writer loses heart, the ideas won’t matter. The writer quits.
If you want to be a published writer, your daydreams for seeing your book on the shelves will have to sustain you for [...]

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Part 2 Daydreaming For the Future.
Last week I started a series on Purposeful Daydreaming. The first category was Daydreaming for ideas. Today, I am revisiting goal setting with Daydreaming for your Future.
It’s been over six months since you may have made any New Years Resolutions about your writing.
Let’s evaluate.
Think about all the writing/editing/critiquing/blogging, etc you [...]

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Part 1:  Daydreaming for Ideas
A few weeks ago, Stephanie mentioned she was starting the writing processes with some daydreaming. Which got me to thinking about daydreaming.
And, since I like to classify, I identified three types of daydreaming a writer should do often. First up on the blog: daydream for ideas.
Ideas are arguably the bread and [...]

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