Archive | November, 2018

New Book Update: Celebrate the “Best of Luck” Letters


Long ago I called them “rejection letters;” more recently I called them “letters of declination” – as in “We decline the opportunity to represent your fiction;” now I call them “best of luck letters” – as in “I wish you the best of luck in your search for representation.” What you call these letters from […]

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Five Reasons to Thank Your Resistance to Writing


How could you possibly be grateful for feeling resistance to your writing? 1.  Resistance Reveals Your Passion A student in my Writer’s Resistance class confessed “I thought I must really not want to be a writer since I’m not writing.” I reassured her that her resistance was a sign that she did want to write. […]

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Real Writers Plan Days Off


  Do you have your Thanksgiving PTO (Personal Time Off) plan in place? When I was a wanna-be writer, I promised myself I’d write on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Eve. I saw all holidays, weekends and vacations as times when I should be able to write. Not surprisingly, I never wrote […]

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Why 50,000 Is Not the Magic #NaNoWriMo Number


To paraphrase of Bullwinkle, “Watch me pull 50,000 words out of my hat.” For those of us who don’t write a novel a month on a regular basis, that snarling lion is our lateral habenula growling at the over-optimistic Bullwinkle part of our brain, “I’m going to do what? Sounds like 50,000 ways to fail. […]

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How to Refresh and Reward Your Readers’ Trust


Even if you haven’t made any of the trust-damaging mistakes I mentioned in my previous post “How Far Should Readers Trust You?“, plenty of other writers have. Chances are, your readers have gotten jaded. Now is the time to distinguish yourself as a writer of impeccable integrity, no matter what genres and platforms you work […]

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