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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…
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The Urgency of Now and Knowing Who You Are
Well, by my own definition, I’m officially in my mid-fifties. For any given decade, I consider the years ending in zero through three to be “early.” Four, five, and six are “mid” while the last three years are “late.” I turned fifty-four on Tuesday. You might think that would be cause for a great, big sigh. Sure, there’s a little of that as well as the realization that there are more years behind me than in front of me. That, my friends, is just a sign of mortality. But here’s the giant cherry on top of this sundae we call life: I’m alive! So it is always good to recognize…
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Taking Stock and Looking Ahead
Are you ready for 2023? I’m a firm believer in constant renewal, be that daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly resets. That is, after all, what New Year’s Resolutions are: a reset. A chance to start a new habit or break an old on. But it is a good idea to plan ahead and be ready for your start date, and that’s where it’s good to review the current year. I actually started the process this week at my office during my lunch hours. I found an empty conference room with a large white board and started taking stock of 2022 in terms of my writing. I made various lists including…
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The Gospel of Creativity with Kevin Smith
I went to “church” on Wednesday night and the preacher was Kevin Smith. Some of you will probably stop reading right now. Kevin Smith? The independent director of films like “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy,” and “Jersey Girl”? The guy who has a few dozen podcasts and fills them with talk of film and comics and humor all laced with profanities? Yup, that’s the one. I’m unique in the world of Kevin Smith fandom. I’ve never seen any of his films. I know him as a podcast personality. Three years ago, while listening to the podcast from SF Signal, there was mention of “…a Batman podcast by filmmaker Kevin Smith where he…