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 mind takes in each...
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...
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...
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....
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...
I have a few writing projects in the chute right now. One I thought I was done with came back to me sometime last week from the editor of the Marine Corps’ professional journal. "The Editor would like to include your article in an Irregular Warfare writing contest," the administrative assistant said in her email. (more…)
I’m sitting out on my balcony this morning, listening to the birds and the beeping of the waste removal truck and a downy woodpecker doing his work in the distance. We were supposed to be out of town on a trip this week, but this hasn’t panned out. So it’s staycation I guess. It very...
Sniffing the wind. This week I have been focusing on creating more structured time for my kids. Since summer let out and virtual school came to a much-welcomed end, that void has been filled with, well nothing. Actually it was filled with media. Nick spent all his waking hours playing Fortnite, and Penny watching iPad or...
Cat fight The other day I decided to start clearing out the office section of my house. Before I got into it, our office supplies resided in several junk drawers strewn about the three floors of my house, with papers and staplers and sticky-notes and at least twelve workbooks issued by Texas public schools piled into...
Protect the process and the work will take care of itself.Dan Brown Chloe About a month ago I decided to purchase the year subscription to MasterClass content after getting bombarded with their limited buy one, get one free promotion. Back in 2017 when MasterClass was newer with fewer course offerings, I had asked for James Patterson’s class...
