Letter Month Guest Post

Have you signed up for the Month of Letters yet? The delightful Mary Robinette Kowal’s annual letter writing challenge kicks off tomorrow. Check it out here: http://lettermo.com/ Today, I have a guest post on the Month of Letters blog about fountain pen love. Share...

Sunday Morning Musing

Musing this Sunday morning about the fact that no matter how hard I try to pack it all in, there will never be enough hours to spend with the people I care about spend alone write all the books I want to write read all the books I want to read travel to all the places I want to go learn all the things I want to learn stop and admire all the views sleep see all the art, watch all the movies, listen to all the music explore all the nooks and crannies hang out and do nothing have all the conversations I want to have and so much more. Suddenly, that big pile of laundry I’d planned to do today seems a whole lot less important. Except, of course, for the problem of not wanting to do most of those things naked… Share...

New Year, New Schedule

Happy new year! It’s taken me this long to settle in to my regular routine again after the holidays, and I’m not sure I’m there even yet. But I’m working on it. I’m not a resolution kind of person, exactly. But I do find the quiet days between Boxing Day and New Year’s, and between New Year’s and the first day of school, some of the best of the year for reflecting on the things I’ve been working on and the year to come. I suppose those days feel a bit like I’ve hit the pause button. They’re quiet, without the busy socializing of the actual holidays, but also without the demands of my regular routine, and I tend to spend a fair bit of time in my head, assessing and looking ahead. And eating chocolate. There’ s no denying a lot of chocolate gets eaten during those days. But this past week, it was back to work and back to routine. And back, of course, to writing. I’ve set some pretty frightening goals for my writing year, given all the things other than writing that demand my time. I’ve talked here before about my Yahtzee-like schedule. Today, I finally sat down and made one for all of 2014. This time, I didn’t just do the daily word count part, but also added sections for bigger goals for each of the projects I’m working on (ie MS1: 10k, 20k, 30k and so on), so that I can keep track not only of what I want to accomplish this year, but of how those daily words add up to bigger achievements. It’s important, I think, to make note of our own successes. And for the first time, I also added in the other writing-related things I want to do this year, including places to indicate I’d written a blog post or sent a piece of snail mail (more on that in another post). It’s daunting, looking at it. So much so that I actually cringe when I see it and don’t want to look directly at it for fear of being entirely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work ahead. But that’s the inherent beauty of this kind of schedule: I don’t have to look at the magnitude. All I have to do today is fill in that one little box. Just one. That’s all. I can do that.   Share...