Category: Uncategorized
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Writing villains under Trump
(Content notice: this post contains a description of being followed by a street harasser.) So it’s been a Month, nationally speaking. Right now, every website I go to is screaming at me about the Paris Accord. My brain is kind of always screaming about the Paris Accord, so it’s nothing I’m not used to on one level.…
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Continuity
When I was at my parents’ house for Easter a couple of weeks ago, my mother plunked a sheet of sketchbook paper in front of me. It was filled, front and back, with an elaborately loopy cursive scrawl that I recognized as my 10-year-old handwriting. I recognized it instantly: it was the first two (and…
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Read It Out
I’m sure every writer out there has been told to read their work out loud while editing. It’s standard advice, and it makes sense. It’s much harder to miss little details when you slow down enough to say every word. A lot of entry-level writing advice is aimed at inserting some practicality into the sometimes…
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On Truth
Sometimes I worry that I only have one story in me, and that I’m just telling that same story over and over again in different ways. It’s a worry that I imagine a lot of writers share. Impostor syndrome is a strong force in creative circles, and it’s easy to fear that someday we’ll be…
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Being Good
So I’ve been thinking a lot about good guys and bad guys this week. It sure seems like there are a lot of the latter these days, with more popping up in the news every day. Bad guys in high positions of power, bad guys passing unjust laws. So does bad leadership and bad laws…
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We’ll Meet It
Well. It’s been quite the year, hasn’t it? Listen, I’m not going to write a thinkpiece about the state of the country/world/human race here. I’m sure you’ve all read as many of those as I have lately, and I’m not really in the mood to read, let alone write, one more. Instead, what I’ve got…
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Life in Marble
Well, the New Year’s resolution to blog more clearly hasn’t been working out so well. In my defense, life has been hectic and odd since my last post. Yeah, I know, what else is new? I’m sure everyone’s heard the oft-told historical tidbit that Michelangelo could envision his entire sculpture when he looked upon an…
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Another new direction
I feel like a theme of this blog thus far has been “I’m trying something new with my life!” Which is probably appropriate for the blog of a writer in her 20s, and I’ve done some pretty cool things in the last few years, but I would like to transition into more of a theme…
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And Now For Something Completely Different
When people ask about my writing process, I doubt the answer they’re expecting to get is, “well, first I write 10 to 15 chapters that just don’t work at all, then I scrap those, start over, and write an entire first draft that also doesn’t work at all, but in a different way.” This seems…
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A Backward Glance
Today, instead of waking up at a frankly unseemly hour of the morning and commuting directly and dangerously into the rising sun, I instead began my first week as an AmeriCorps alumna instead of an AmeriCorps member. My unexpected life detour into disaster recovery has come to an end. It was a pretty bumpy road at times, but…