No, You’re (Still) Not Ready to Publish

From my 2011 archives… Don’t you hate it when the Inner Critic is right? After years of being shoved aside and trampled, he gloats over fleeting opportunities to jump up and down and yell, “I told you so!” and it’s so annoying. It’s not easy to admit, but many of us are probably among the

The Squint Test and Tolerating the Imperfect

Sharing some pre-Christmas thoughts in this reprise from 2009… ~ Through the years my husband has wound umpteen dozen strings of lights around our Christmas trees … and unwound them … and rewound them. It’s hard to tell if they’re perfectly spaced even when the strings are lit up, so he does “the squint test”. Peering

No, You’re Not Ready to Publish

. Don’t you hate it when the Inner Critic is right? After years of being shoved aside and trampled, he gloats over fleeting opportunities to jump up and down and yell, “I told you so!” and it’s so annoying. It’s not easy to admit, but many of us are probably among the 99.9% of writers

Writing a Really Bad Novel

Every so often it’s good to laugh at yourself. While reminiscing about my embarrassingly bad first novel I came across an old article written by John Hewitt at PoeWar entitled, Want to Write a Novel Badly? Here’s How! In it he lists 32 steps. I won’t admit how many of them I employed in that

The Squint Test, or Tolerating the Imperfect

Through the years my husband has wound umpteen dozen strings of lights around our Christmas trees… and unwound them… and rewound them. It’s hard to tell if they’re perfectly spaced even when the strings are lit up, so he does “the squint test”. Peering at the tree while squinting removes all the visual distractions except