Reading time: Less than 2 minutes If your office is an unmitigated mess (like mine was this summer), here are some office cleaning tips that will help you become more organized… Does having a tidy office or a clean desk motivate you? I know it makes a huge difference for me, although not everyone is wired […]
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes and metaphors from Michael Crummy…. Michael Crummy was born in Buchans, a mining town in the interior of Newfoundland — “as far from the salt water as you can
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: mauzy… When I travel, I like to read a book set in the place I’m travelling to. My husband and I spent two weeks in Newfoundland this summer
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Reading time: Just over 3 minutes Most of us know it’s a good idea to show compassion to others but how often do we consider showing ourselves some simple self-compassion? Writers are prone to self-criticism. We tend to embrace directives such as, “Our children can achieve great things when we set high expectations for them.” (Jeb
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about facing the blank page….. If you give me a choice between reading a blog post or watching a
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute Do you try to read articles or blog posts as soon as you see them? With an app called Pocket you can safely put them aside until a time that’s more convenient for you. Nothing thrills me more than being able to use some sort of technology. What do
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about some figurative language from Jill Lepore… I am so profoundly tired of the American election that when I rediscovered a note I’d written to myself about it back in August, I sighed. Isn’t it
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: cruft… My word-of-the-week comes from my good friend Eve Johnson. She stumbled across it twice in one day. The word, cruft, was new to me as well. It means
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Reading time: Less than 3 minutes Predicting what might go wrong is not a dark art — it’s an essential skill for anyone who wants to pursue a career as a writer… My husband considers me to be an awfulizer. By this he means a person who expects the worst to happen. For example, if
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post written by Cal Newport… I discovered Cal Newport (pictured above) five or six years ago via a post headlined something like:
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