Small Details Make A Difference

July 28, 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

Ever overlooked a detail or powered through an exposition paragraph because you thought it didn’t matter? What about fudging the specifics of a process because you were too lazy to look it up? How about settling for something approximating the description you really wanted because thinking of the right word was taking too long? Yeah… […]

How Fly Fishing Taught Me To Write

May 25, 2017.Reading time 7 minutes.

Patience. Calm. Stillness. These are all virtues. Unfortunately, they’re also boring as s***. No matter how boring they might seem, though, those virtues embodied the scene I found myself in one Friday just a few weeks ago up in the Rocky Mountains: In early May I flew across the country with a few guys to stay […]

Write In Weird Places II – The Metro

April 25, 2017.Reading time 8 minutes.

Have you ever been so entirely snared by a story idea that everything else immediately takes second place? I’m not talking about a bolt-of-lightning idea – one of those rabbits that comes out of nowhere and invades your thoughts for a day or a week – I’m talking about something more long term. A story […]

April Challenge – Week 3 Recap – Write Slow

April 22, 2017.Reading time 8 minutes.

It’s hard to believe that there are only 10 days left in April, isn’t it? Where does the time go? What have I accomplished? Why isn’t my book done yet? This week of intense writing has taught me something extremely valuable, something for which I think I’ll be grateful for a long time to come. […]

April Challenge – Week 2 Recap – This S*** Is Getting Tough

April 15, 2017.Reading time 9 minutes.

Happy Saturday, everyone. Today is April 15, which means we’re halfway through the challenge. If you missed either of my last two posts, you can find them here and here. The moral of this week was pretty simple and obvious: This s*** is getting a lot harder. Before I get into any of that in […]

April Challenge – Have You Ever Eaten Four Bananas?

April 8, 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

Early mornings, late nights, a trillion words written, loud music, standing desks, and bananas – week 1 of the April challenge was a massive success. If you haven’t read my post about what I’m doing this month, check it out here. As a quick recap, I promised to: Write 90,000 words in April (3,000 a […]

How To Fly Stress Free

April 5, 2017.Reading time 4 minutes.

We writers are stressed out, jumpy folks, don’t you think? Some of us can be downright irritable. We can be argumentative and contrarian. A lot of us aren’t very good in crowds. We get anxious a lot. That’s the stereotype, I know, so I apologize if any of you are different. I can just see […]

Working On A Beautiful Spring Day

March 19, 2017.Reading time 5 minutes.

It’s been cold in DC for the last few weeks. Not just chilly, but bone-biting, wind-driving, snow-piling cold. The bulk of people in the city have spent their time hiding indoors, layering like they live in the North Pole, and Ubering places they could easily have walked. I Ubered 4 blocks the other day. It was […]

15 Days to Done

March 15, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

What is it about a challenge that motivates us so much? Why is the pull of a one-week challenge so alluring? There is something a little magical, and a little scary, about setting a short-term goal for yourself and driving towards it with all the power you can muster. You see it in the fitness industry […]

Words On A Plane

March 13, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

A couple weeks ago, after a work trip to Montreal, I was going to write a blog post about how much I love working on planes – they’re actually one of my favorite places to write. I’d gotten through a couple of paragraph before I thought, “Hm, shouldn’t I wait to write this blog post […]