A Time Travel Rabbit Hole
I have spent the better part of the day packing boxes, getting them ready for movers to wisk away into the portable storage container that’s sitting on my driveway. The moving company is called College Hunks Movers. I saw them advertised someplace, and called and that was that. I don’t shop around unless Steve makes...
Book Pick- Gore Vidal’s, “Burr”
I’m giddy at the fact that tomorrow on July 3rd, Disney + is going to premier Hamilton as a live stage production recording with all the original cast. You can view the trailer here. I was lucky enough to see it live in 2018 when it came through Houston. The tickets...
How Our Brain Processes Written Words
I watched Abbiee Emmons’ YouTube video about narrative pacing the other day (she has a lot of great writing tips on her channel), in which she explains how the rate at which your brain processes each written word affects the pace of your writing. This is because while reading, your conscious...
Scratching the Surface of Indie-Publishing
I’m sitting here on the floor of my bedroom, it’s nearly the end of the day, past 10 pm. I think every one of us is on an iPad with no sign of shutting down. We like to call moments like these, independent study time. Yesterday I heard from my editor. She apologized for being...
How to Get Started Writing Book Reviews
Around the playground. Photo credit: Penny My first opportunity to write a book review came when the editor of Task & Purpose emailed me and asked if I wanted to review a fiction anthology titled, The Road Ahead: Stories of the Forever War. At the time, I had already written a few...
How to Plan Your Writing Projects
Visiting with J this week, it occurred to me that it's fun to visit with friends and family around shared interests via apps. It's something different from the usual catching up over the phone, which sometimes feels like a run-down of "this is what I've been doing since the last time we talked," rather than...
How to go From Concrete to Abstract in Personal Essays
Yesterday one of my best friends stationed in Germany messaged me to say she was bombing into Texas for 24 hours on some military-related duty. Unfortunately, it was San Antonio, not Houston, where she would make her Texas pit stop. “It’s not that far!” I had said, “It’s only three hours. I’ll come with Penny....
Use A Grammar Word Processor
Northern Cardinals. Males are red, females are brown. Who knew? (Google did) Yesterday I said I would talk about the Hemingway App, so here goes. The Hemingway App is a word processor technically, but it does more than run a spell check on your text the way Microsoft Word does. The Hemingway App doesn’t do spell...