-
What “Saturday Night Live” Can Teach Writers About Failure
Failure sucks, but failure isn’t all bad. After rehearsal on Thursday night, I came back home to find my wife watching a new four-part documentary on the history of Saturday Night Live. I missed the first episode and most of the second, but I ended up watching the last two. The third episode is an entire deep dive on the Cowbell sketch. That was fun. The fourth, however, was brand-new to me. Entitled, “Season 11: The Weird Year,” it details the new-to-me saga of that year. And there was a lot I didn’t know. Randy Quaid was a cast member?! Full disclosure: I didn’t start watching SNL regularly until my…
-
Give Yourself the Grace to (Re)Start Your New Year’s Resolutions
How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along? Today is Quitter’s Day 2025. It’s the day when a shocking 80% or more people who made New Year’s resolutions have tapped out. These are the same folks who made decisions so fervently at midnight on 1 January. I’m one of those folks who always uses a new year (or month or week or day) to reset myself and my habits. Because that’s what resolutions really are, habits. Some of these habits have become embedded in my internal hard drive. I no longer need to keep track of my daily flossing because, years ago, I created the habit. Ditto for my daily…
-
How to Ignite Your Inner Fire During Midlife
I’m not sure how many folks might need to read Chip Copley’s Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, but I certainly did. Now, before we go any further, I must say that I am not going through a midlife crisis. At all. Most people who see me ask me why I’m always smiling or be-bopping to a song I hear in my head. I’m an optimistic, happy person. Have been for as long as I can remember. But this book ignited something in me. I refer to my current age as “fifty f*cking five!” so you know where I am in life. It’s true…
-
How Do You Overcome Resistance in Your Creative Life?
(This was originally written in 2022, but this is a perennial reminder that Resistance is always present and we need to keep it at bay.) Where has this book been all my writing life? Well, right in front of me, the entire time. I’ve known about Steven Pressfield for a good number of years. In fact, I have his blog feed in my Feedly app and I am a subscriber to his email. But in all that time, I had never sat down and read his most famous non-fiction book: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. I guess I just wasn’t ready for…
-
There Are Too Many Books and Too Little Time. Now What?
It started with The Six Million Dollar Man. A few weeks ago, I learned that the debut of one of my favorite childhood TV shows occurred fifty years ago. With that in mind, I thought about going back and rewatching the series, this time with adult eyes, and see how it holds up. When I got to the Peacock, I realized there were 99 episodes. I don’t have time for that, so I went to Google and conducted a search of the Top 10 episodes of the show. Thankfully, the Bigfoot episodes are in there as well as a few crossovers with The Bionic Woman (weren’t those epic episodes!). Now,…
-
Are you one of the 80% or the 8%?
Are you one of the 80% or the 8%? The first data point is the estimated number of people who fail and/or opt out of New Year’s Resolutions by the end of January. I’ve seen other stats that put that number at 43%. There’s even a day called Quitter’s Day that lands on 17 January where many folks who brimmed with confidence on New Year’s Day just stop. No matter the quitting number, think about the success number: 8%. That’s a single digit. Not even 10% of the people polled over the years have managed to continue their resolutions through 365 days. That’s shocking and, yet, not surprising, is it?…
-
How Do You Keep Track of What You Read (and Watch)?
On New Year’s Day 2023, I decided to try something new. I have long kept scattered notes about the things I consume. This includes books, movies, TV shows, music, and various other things. But these lists and such remain, well, scattered. Over the past couple of years, the writer Ryan Holiday landed on my radar. He is the bookstore owner who writes about the Stoics and their philosophy and how it is still relevant in the 21st Century. In my reading about how Holiday researches and studies his subjects, I learned he keeps an extensive notecard system. His research assistant, Billy Oppenheimer, also keeps an extensive set of notecards. He…
-
FDR, Ted Lasso, and The Value of Kindness
Television this week boiled down to two things: the three-part, six-hour FDR documentary on The History Channel and the series finale of Apple TV’s Ted Lasso. In reflecting on both shows, I realized both programs demonstrated how one man can show those around him the value of kindness. FDR Based on the works of Doris Kearns Goodwin, “FDR” highlighted the life, career, and presidency of our 32nd president. Privileged from birth, FDR’s life was turned upside down when he contracted polio at age thirty-nine. His incapacitation meant he had to rely on others for nearly everything. It was in the long, slow process of learning to live with polio and…
-
What Are You Going To Do With the 99 Days of Summer 2023?
Veteran writer Dean Wesley Smith dubs the summer months the Time of the Great Forgetting. It’s that point in the year when the good intentions of New Year’s Resolutions made in the depths of winter fall by the wayside in bright light of hot summer days when the pull to do just about anything other than writing draws writers away from their keyboards. It’s only in later summer and early fall when writers remember their annual goals and either charge full-stream ahead and barrel to the end of the year, desperately hoping to achieve their milestones, or just give up and do something else. He speaks the truth. But I’ve…
-
Two-a-Day Writing Sessions to Speed Up Your Writing
For those of us with a day job that is not fiction writing, we have to choose to carve out time in our day to write our stories. But there’s never enough time, is there? Optimizing one’s time becomes crucial in our day-to-day writing experiences. You want to ensure you are making visible progress despite wanting more time to write and not having any. I’m pretty sure most of us know what a writing sprint is. You set a timer for any length of time and then you go, go, go and write until the timer sounds. Fifteen minutes is cited as a good number, and, depending on how fast…