This has been a very challenging year. I’m not going into details again, but basically my entire life fell apart and had to be put back together. But in the middle of all of this, I managed to publish 2 books, write 200,000 new words, and obtain a certificate in Digital Art and Graphic Design. I am very proud of those accomplishments. But as the year ends, I want to […]
What I’m Looking Forward to in 2025 Read More »
I’m on record talking about what a shit year this was for me. Not going to review that here. But it was also a year of incredible growth and learning, so as the year ends, I want to review the important things that I learned. I learned that I could survive and accomplish things when everything is falling apart, but only up to a certain point. Yes, I can
I watched 50 full seasons of TV shows this year. I do not consider this an accomplishment, but at least these days, with streaming apps, when I watch something, I watch it on purpose, I don’t just sit in front of the TV because it’s on. As you might imagine, most of the shows I watched were SFF-adjacent, but not all of them. But anyway, these are my favorite shows
My Favorite TV Shows of 2024 Read More »
I’ve been playing D&D Regularly since 2021, after a lifetime of wanting to and never finding a group. It is, hands down, some of the most fun I’ve ever had. I play an overpowered half-elf Oath of Devotion himbo Paladin. I’m one of the group tanks. This is a character very much unlike me in real life, and that is a feature not a bug. He’s also just recently graduated
Everything I Really Need to Know in Life, I Learned from Playing Dungeons and Dragons Read More »
Well, THAT happened. That’s my response when looking back at 2024. The badness really started around last Thanksgiving, when I left my job at the library and things got messy. Literally, this was a volunteer job, and I wanted my weekends free so I could go back to school. The rest of the year didn’t get any better. My efforts to save my house came to nothing, and I had
2024 and Other Disasters Read More »
I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t think stories were important. Stories have, in the past, saved my life. When I was a suicidal teenager, one of the reasons I held on was because I wanted to find out what happened next in Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics. That sounds like a joke, and maybe it is, a little bit, but not entirely. The right story at the right
The Stories We Tell Ourselves Read More »
I’ve been doing a deep dive into worldbuilding lately because that’s where I identified I most needed to level up. And I have so many ideas for worlds, characters, and stories that the hard part is realizing that I can’t do everything at once, and I know from experience that I can’t draft more than one book at a time. So, I used my favorite coping strategy, making a
The State of Things Read More »
I’ve refined my writing process over the years to something that works pretty well for me. I have a list of plot points and scenes because it’s important that I have some idea of where a story is going. In years past, when I did not have this, I would write myself off a cliff and never finish the project. At least four books died that way and
The Map is not the Mountain Read More »
Whenever I see a list of questions people have for working writers, ‘How do you get over writer’s block?’ is near the top. I understand why this is such a common question. A lot of people seem to deal with this issue, and until I figured out my process, it happened to me a lot. Writer’s block can be a lot of things. For me, it was happening because I
What We Talk About When We Talk About Writer’s Block Read More »
It’s been a rough couple of months. Sometimes, I have a real ‘my eyes are bigger than my stomach’ thing going on when it comes to things I want to do and accomplish. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it does lead me into situations where I am stressed and overwhelmed and wondering why. I read something lately, I think it was in Ali Abdal’s ‘Stress-Free Productivity,’
The Art of Winnowing Read More »