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Most of us don’t have conscious end-goals for our lives.  We don’t have principles that we can state.  We don’t know ourselves all that well.  Sometimes we think we have these things and we don’t:  the things we deeply, truly believe in are often beyond our grasp. So maybe starting off with long-term planning as

Marketing:  how much effort does this technique take; how durable is the effect of the technique; what is the impact of the technique?  Three axes for a graph: effort, durability, impact. A book review is high effort, high durability, high impact.  A single tweet is low effort, low durability, low impact.  A well-coordinated social media

I’m used to defining the story of a life.  Not with each character I create, but with each book.  There’s one main character; the entire book becomes a kind of exoskeleton for the character within.  The other characters are reactions, motifs, variations, opinions–all of them filtered and refiltered through the main character’s perspective.  If I

This morning was a pretty serious anxiety attack (for me; I didn’t have to go to the hospital or anything).  I got to the point where I could journal, then started working away at the knot of it, pulling out one thread at a time.  Now, I’m still anxious–but I’m not locked up and frozen.

I’ve been working with some people (Shannon Lawrence, Veronica Calisto, Pete Aldin, and Melissa Locy) to put together a panel on plot twists for Denver ComicCon, at the end of June. My line in the sand:  if it’s gonna be an epic, major, unforgettable plot twist…you have to give the reader a key to it

Having a busy, hyperactive mind often shows up in my journaling as a hint that there’s something big on my mind behind all the rest of the stuff.  When I can’t finish a sentence–when I not only can’t finish a sentence but have to start midway through the next sentence–when I’m writing so quickly that

Note: I’m a GenX-er. So I got the following spam the other day: I WILL REPORT YOU. YOU PIECE OF SHIT… Hey, Stop stalking me and my friend or I will report you. You piece of shit, cock-sucker douche. I do not know why you are doing this! You slept together once, only once. It

So I tried to do some DIY plumbing the other day.  It didn’t work out the way I hoped:  easy, simple, straightforward.  Just like in the YouTube videos. Instead I found myself having a breakdown.  Tears, self-recriminations, the whole bit.  I was a terrible person who never should have tried.  (I’m 43.)  And the only