Category: Create

Kedging

Kedges inspire and help you fall in love with your own big bad audacious self.  Often Kedges help you live into a dream you have for your life, and just haven’t allowed yourself to live it or even imagine it. A…

EPC — Art vs. Craft

There  is some lively discussion within  these interviews  about if and how you can learn writing from a teacher. Caroline Bird expresses skepticism, then off the tape revised her position, saying, “I think you can teach the craft of writing. The art of writing has to come from within, that cannot be taught.” Talent without discipline is not fruitful, but discipline without talent lacks effective voice.

Setting direction

First time I drove a car, my father told me to get in to our aging Cadillac and drive it down the main street of Perkasie, our small town  In retrospect, I am impressed with his confidence in me, that…

Imposter Syndrome, for authors

For those of us who truly care about writing, owning our author-ity as an author is sometimes a challenge, both because there is almost always a writer more successful than we are, and also because there are so many pretenders.…

Software upgrades

When we grow emotionally, it affects people around us.  As we change the stance we take in the world, and the stance we take for ourselves, how people perceive and interact with us must also change.  But this doesn’t always…

Restructuring time

Work creates a structure in our lives.  A steady job circumscribes our time.  Instead of circadian rhythms, we adapt to corporate rhythms, rising with the echoes of old punch clocks and factory whistles, timing our commute to the tides of…

NaBloPoMo: a post-Sandy alternative to NaNoWriMo

NaBloPoMo (nah-blow-POE-moe)  is a blog-centric riff on NaNoWriMo.  (nan-oh-WRY-moe). Lest you think I am writing gibberish, let me expand. NoNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month –which occurs annually in November. Their tag line is “November 1-30, 2012:  thirty days of…

EPC — Allowing for Change

Rachel Vail’s “Permission not to have to be Mozart” really resounds for me. I have wrestled with the myth that, to write and let you read it, my thinking  has to be fully mature, complete, finished—and that five years from now, I’d agree 100% with what I wrote. There is something daunting about the permanence  of the written word. A phone call fades, even e-mail is more likely to be deleted than not. But a written  note can be taken out and read over and over again, over time. And it continues to speak from the person who wrote it—who I might not be in five years.