I oddly always use Summer as a time to get a massive chunk of work done. It’s the start of development season for network television here in Los Angeles; the days are longer meaning more sunlight to convince me it’s not time to stop working, and – the real reason – I didn’t get a staff writing job on a network television show so I’m …
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Last month I finally read Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. I’m embarrassed to admit it was last month and not when it came out four years ago because I listened to the negative press instead of making my own evaluation. Shame on me because I missed out on years of having a more gender-informed perspective on the working world that might have changed a lot of the ways I …
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Hello and Happy network TV staffing season to you all! If you know what that means then my thoughts and prayers are with you during this horrific time of year. If you don’t, then this post is for you. Writers: feel free to use this mock conversation as a guide to explaining your life. Others: feel free to use this mock conversation as motivation to …
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* For the past month I’ve written “de-clutter desk drawers” on the top of my to-do list. My desk drawers are a mess. Every time I sit down at my desk to write I think about those messy drawers, contemplate re-organizing and then shove more things inside. I waste 15 to 20 (so 30…) minutes every morning searching for the right pen or notecards or …
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[Image source: Brain Dump by Jessabel on Deviant Art] My friends over at Writing Pad (the writing school where I teach) posted the link to an article about prepping to outline your novel in advance of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, hahahaha), which is November – I assume because they both start with an N. The article (link through photo) is really helpful and very …
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Today is a really exciting day. As I’ve hinted at for the past year and a half, I wrote a YA novel and to make matters even more exciting, the fine people at Full Fathom Five published it! Look! Here it is on their website! They included a picture of me (by the great Jenny Anderson) so you can be sure this is all true information. …
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10 years ago I had the incredible good fortune of sitting down with William Zinsser, author of “On Writing Well,” which sold 1.5 million copies. Zinsser wrote over a dozen other books, taught at Yale among other places, was a drama editor and a movie critic for The New York Herald Tribune and served as executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He passed away on …
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Yesterday I finished my first novel. Eventually I’ll get into how it came to be that I wrote my first novel (still not sure), when the process started (31 years ago?) and how long the whole thing took (felt like five years and also five days), but for now I want to focus on how you can finish writing your first novel, too. Here are …
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This marks the 999th time I have opened my blogger account and started typing into this blank, white box. Not every post made it live, but the official file number is 999. I cannot fathom how that’s possible, but I have never been prouder. This project started as a place to share what I was experiencing as a confused post-grad in a big, expensive city …
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photo credit: my friend jenny anderson! I’m sorry I said pussy in the title of this post, but it’s relevant to the point of the whole post so I sort of had to do it. I thought about putting a * where the u is, but everyone who gets offended by the word pussy knows how to spell the word, and I don’t know how …
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