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Lion and Lamb: The Book With the Wittiest Banter This Side of Nick and Nora
“They can catch a killer—if they don’t kill each other first.” That’s the tagline for LION & LAMB, the new novel by James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski, released just a couple of weeks ago and I downloaded the audiobook that very day. Yet I had to finish another book before I pushed play on Lion & Lamb, but as soon as it started, I wondered why it took me so long. Okay, fine, it was only a week. Quarterback Archie Hughes of the Philadelphia Eagles is a week away from starting in the NFC Championship Game, the last step before the Super Bowl. And he’s found dead in his car.…
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When a Show is Cancelled, You Get to Write the Rest of the Story
Well, that sucks. Whenever my wife and I start watching an older show on streaming, I don’t look the show up on the internet. I don’t want to be spoiled about things the world already knows. For example, when I started watching “Brothers and Sisters,” my wife did look up the show and discovered Rob Lowe departed the series before its end. I just like to keep the watching as pure as possible. Which can make for a great viewing experience. It can also lead to heartbreak. We recently watched the Hulu series, “Reboot.” It follows the cast and crew of a fictional 1990s TV show that was cancelled and…
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Recharging the Excitement by Talking Shop About Writing
It is rare that we constantly sustain the excitement of what we do. We writers can love the writing process, but after, say, you hit 50,000 words, sometimes the work is more like work than magic. The same thing applies to the publishing side of things. When we’ve finished a manuscript, now comes the more mundane aspects of our jobs: editing, copy editing, proofing, cover design, and uploading files for publication and distribution. After you’ve done it enough times, it becomes routine. A little rote. You know you need to do it, but you might look forward to it the least. That is until you get to talk to someone…
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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…
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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…
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When You’re Down in the Dumps, Be Open to the World Helping You
Sometimes, creativity is hard, discouraging, and challenging. In every creative project, there is always a moment (or moments) when you question what you’re doing. It’s an inevitable part of the process. What do you do? Be open to the signs the world is sending you. By the way, I’m using “creative” here because this applies to any type of creative thing you do, whether it be writing, painting, composing, researching, or building something. The Challenge of the Tedious Work I experienced a couple of challenging days earlier this week. They were days in which I began to question why I do the writing stuff and all the surrounding things an…
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Do You Ever Defy Expectations Like Harrison Ford?
Let’s be honest: if you watched Apple TV’s “Shrinking” series, a good number of us did so because we had one overriding thought: Harrison Ford doing a comedy? Granted, it’s not a typical comedy sitcom with a laugh track on a stage with a studio audience. But it’s still a comedy. A trio of folks—Jason Segel, Bill Lawrence, and Brett Goldstein—created the show, and they know comedy. The great thing about this 10-episode series: it is a comedy, but it is also something else: it’s an honest look a grief, how people get through it, and the pitfalls and victories along the way. And it has Harrison Ford doing comedy.…
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If You’re a Professional Copywriter, There’s a Book You Should Read
We talk a lot here about fiction writing, but there are a good number of folks who make a living with a day job that also involves writing. I’m one of those fortunate individuals. I’m a marketing/corporate writer for an oil and gas company so I get to write and create content all day long. That includes my lunch hour fiction-writing sessions. The corporate environment in which I find myself Mondays through Fridays is a good one, the most creative one in which I’ve worked. Everyone feels zero issues with chiming in on items, even if it’s a writer like me commenting on a design element or one of the…
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When Life Throws Curve Balls at Your Resolutions
How are those resolutions coming along? It’s Day 7 of January 2023, a full week after many of us toasted the new year at midnight and resolved to make changes in our lives. Back in December, I wrote about making resolutions—or habit changes—with the guiding principle of “just try.” Most of us want to change something about ourselves—to become a better version of ourselves—so the first step is to decide to try. The next (and the next and the next) is to follow through. Depending on where you get your data, a large percentage of folks who make new year’s resolutions fail by February. One statistic I found was 80%.…
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New Year’s Resolutions: Just Try
Do you have your New Year’s resolutions planned yet? Yeah, yeah, I know it’s still two weeks away but this will be my last post at Do Some Damage until January. But I’ve already started thinking and planning the things I want to accomplish in 2023 and it is really important to kick off the year on a good note. On the Daily Stoic podcast, host Ryan Holiday wondered why we constantly make New Year’s resolutions and he brought in a quote from Samuel Johnson: “Reformation is necessary and despair is criminal.” I looked up this quote to see if it is part of something larger and it is: “When…