5 Activities to do When You Need a Writing Break

The act of writing steals a surprising amount of mental energy! Sometimes it can creep up unknowingly. One moment you're deep into writing an emotional dialogue scene, and the next you're sitting at the blinking cursor on your screen, without a single sentence coming to your mind. When this happens, sometimes it's best to get …

3 Awesome Books I Read in 2021

I read quite a few books in 2021. Admittedly, the majority of them were rereads of some of my favorite books. I'm a sucker for rereading great stories! However, I did get around to reading quite a few new novels I'd never read, and there were some in particular that I thoroughly enjoyed! Today I …

4 Years of Blogging!

4 years. Whoa. It's pretty crazy when I look back on it--four years of writing blog posts, interacting with readers, growing and improving in my writing. It's been a wild ride, and I wouldn't go back and erase it for the world! It has been so much fun, and so beneficial to my writing journey …

Short Story: Dragon-Silenced

Smoke rolled over the farmlands that early spring morning as Julie walked, head bent to the oddly warm wind, toward the barn. The sun attempted to stream through the haze but only succeeded in painting the land with a sickly orange light. The frigid atmosphere of the spring day mixed with the heavy smoke made …

3 Reasons You Should Try NaNoWriMo

Well hey there! This post is a little close to the beginning of NaNoWriMo, but I wanted to write it anyway. If you're a writer, sitting on the fence between fully committing to NaNoWriMo 2021 (National Novel Writing Month, where you attempt to write a 50,000+ word story in the month of November) I would …

Snippets from Novelette: The Hunter’s Son

Hello hello, everyone!! I hope you're all having a delightfully exquisite day! As some of you may know from my last newsletter (follow my email list to receive that if you are not yet following!!) I wrote a short fantasy adventure novelette in early August just for fun and to stretch my writing muscles. Well …

The Pros and Cons of Titling Your Chapters

Chapter titles! When I was a kid, I loved reading chapter titles. I also loved putting them in my own stories--but my chapter titles were garbage! 😛 Some people love chapter titles, others hate them! So today I thought it would be a fun idea for a blog post to weigh the pros and cons …

How to Complete Your First Draft (and Fast!)

Hello hello! Writing the first draft of a novel is quite difficult. Completing a full draft is even harder! In my time talking to other writers through online communities and other places, it seems that a very common problem new writers have is struggling to complete that first draft of a story idea. Perhaps they …

Short Story: Provided

Hello hello, my friend! Today I have an exciting post for you. For a while now, I've been working on a short story. I wanted to try to make this one as polished as possible, so I took some time to edit it and have some other people read through it. Now, at last, I …

3 Ways to Find Your Genre

Hey there! A very common question I've seen in the writing community is beginning writers (or even some intermediate writers!) asking, "How do I find the right genre for me?" It seems that they enjoy bouncing around between multiple genres, or just can't find one they really really like. I'm not beating up on any …