I talked about expectations a few days ago, and just over the weekend I’ve come upon a situation where I got to put my preaching into practice. Let me back up for a second. In case you don’t recognize the quote in this post’s title, it’s from a pretty fantastic movie called Eight Below. In it, a man determined to…
No, I’m not referring to the Dickens novel by that name, though it’s one of my all-time favorite books. I’m referring to something we all do every single day that we often may not even realize. I just got back from a weekend retreat for Christian moms. My own mom helps run it, and I’ve gone along to help serve…
We’ve all heard “don’t judge a book by its cover.” We all do it anyway. We can’t help it–the cover is after all the face of the book! If the cover looks boring or unprofessional, we figure it stands to reason that what lies inside is, also. Even if such an assumption can be quite unfair. Well, I committed an…
Well, now it’s public and I can finally admit the main reason I’ve had so much trouble keeping up with blogging, writing, emails, and really all forms of pretty much everything. After many years of creating fictional people to populate the pages of my stories, it’s time for me to make a real person to populate my home! Yes, my…
Someone in a Facebook group for clean indie authors that I’m part of asked an interesting question earlier–how long do you wait after writing something to edit it? The answers were as varied as “ten seconds” and “several years” with any number of months and weeks in between. It reaffirmed what I already know–that the methods that work for each…
Last week, I wrote about how much I hate when people over promise things they can’t possibly deliver in stories. It got me thinking about a few of my other trope pet peeves, so I figured I might as well dedicate another post or two to them and see whether anyone else agrees with me! I’ve been slowly making my…
For the past few months, my husband and I have been watching a brilliant show called Person of Interest. If you aren’t familiar with it, the premise is that there’s a machine that sees everything and can predict threats of violence–mostly designed to prevent terrorist attacks, but its creator also uses it to try to save the “irrelevant” people–people whose…
Do you have any television pet peeves? Tropes that just especially get under your skin, or conventions that you absolutely cannot stand? There’s something that I see constantly on television shows and in movies, and every time it happens I get mad. I complain to whoever I’m with, or if I’m alone I just make upset faces and shake my…
Hello, and happy New Year to all! As you may have noticed, I took December off from blogging or really much of anything writing-or-marketing related, for some much-needed rest and family time over the holidays. But now I’m going to try to get back on my schedule. And for my first 2018 post, I have something super exciting for y’all–I,…
I remember when I was a kid, I marveled at how little my parents read. Oh they read, probably more than most people, but they didn’t meet my standard of gobbling books whole in the span of a day or two, so I was perplexed. After all, they were grown-ups. They could do anything they wanted! To me, that would…