Last night when I was playing City of Heroes (the only game I am currently addicted to) I was on a team with a toon name Blazing Billy. I can’t remember now how the conversation started but he said, “I love sifting through entrails.” My creativity sensor went off and I had the opening sentence [...]

This morning I woke up and started reading my e-mail as I usually do. There were a couple of posts on one of my mailing lists that got my attention. One talked about motivation and the other about an incident with some high school kids up in Canada and the dumb things they wrote about [...]

Well, I did a lot of work on my book about emus. I, however, have hit a bit of a wall with one section of the book. Everything else in the book has been really easy to write but this one section has bothered me since I started the project in 2004. I think it [...]

I hate the ebb and flow of my muse. Some days I just can’t write fast enough to get it all down, like yesterday, but most days the muse is there but I can’t be motivated to write a single word on any of my stories. That really bothers me. I want to do the writing [...]

I just got back from the post office where I mailed my first submission to a children’s magazine.  I, perhaps a bit too optimistically, sent it to Highlights for Children.The story is a fictional story about how a bored 10 year old girl and her babysitter create a spring/summer time science project. The project uses commonly found [...]

I know we have all warned and been warned about asking our significant others for critique help on our writing because they’re not going to give you the insight that you need and are going to be quick to say “it’s great!”. In the past that has frequently been the case for me as well. I [...]

Well, to Highlights anyway. I wrote a story last fall for possible submission to Highlights for Children. Or perhaps American Girl magazine. The story shows you how to do a science craft project within the story and the sidebar tells you more about the science bits of the project. I really love these kinds of stories [...]

I didn’t get around to reading yesterday but I did make progress in other areas. I got more done on “The Tea Party”. Yay! I really am quite pleased with the new depth of the story and just how different it is from the original. The other hurdle I achieved yesterday was to send it [...]

I think I might be getting carried away with this whole take charge of my life and get more involved in things. Yesterday I went the the Co-op meeting where we were going to be electing the new board members. I was running unopposed for Assistant Secretary. I wasn’t sure what I was going to [...]

I read two chapters (well, actually a smidge more than that) from the book. It has been mostly review so far, which can be quite boring to read but the good part of it is that it shows how much I’ve learned over the years I’ve been on the various writers mailing lists. I guess the folks [...]

Thursday wasn’t so great for getting my goals accomplished. I was really tired (4 hours of sleep will do that to you) so it was difficult to concentrate. I had my magazine class in the afternoon (I help a group of middle schoolers create an ezine at an after school program) so that took up [...]

In my first blog post I talked about being afraid that people will find me to be a fraud and that I say I’m a writer when I really can’t write myself out of a corner. I was going through old e-mail looking for the critique for “The Tea Party” and came across one that [...]

Yesterday I accomplished all my goals. I picked a book, I worked on “The Best Day Ever”, thought about working on a horror-ish short story that I wrote last year for a contest and dug out the one critique I had for it, and, the hardest task, I read the first chapter in the book. [...]

I wandered over to my bookself about an hour ago to follow thru on the goal I set for yesterday to pick a book about writing to start reading. I have books for various genres and aspects of writing. I figured since the first piece I am working on is going to be a children’s [...]

I decided that I would start working on the racing manuscript last night. It is tentatively called “The Best Day Ever”. I had a couple of older versions already done that I worked from to create my third version of the story. It took awhile to actually do it because I allowed myself to be distracted by American [...]

Today I have two goals. The first one is to choose one of the couple dozen books I have about writing and start reading it. Even if I only read one chapter a day it will be that much more that I know compared with the day before. I’ll let you know what I pick after I’ve picked and [...]

I blame Dotti Enderle for my thinking about this today. I was reading her blog (http://blog.myspace.com/dottienderle) and there was an entry about asking the ghosts of famous writers what was the trick was for being a great writer. It got me to thinking about myself as a writer. I’ve been writing stories since I was a [...]