Tuesday, July 17, 2012

How to Turn Minor Annoyances into EPICS


Growing up my father would sing and play guitar to put me and my brother to sleep. Amidst the classic rock standards (The Stones, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin) he also played a lot of his own material. My dad’s a gifted musician and lyricist and to me, listening to him play as I dropped off to sleep, there was never a drop in quality when he would switch back and forth between McCartney to Lennon to himself to Robert Plant. Even now as an adult I still believe that.

Dad’s songs had great melodies and lyrics but an overwhelming majority of them were about heartache. Think ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones, mix in ‘Yesterday’ and you’re getting close to the level of angst my dad imbued his songs with. Remember, he wrote these songs as a teenage boy, long before he fell in love with my mother, and as the saying goes he wrote what he knew. One night after listening him sing one of his more passionate songs about a woman who had cast him aside coldly and cruelly, I had to ask:

 “Jeez dad, what did this girl do to you?”

Friday, July 13, 2012

New Story in Woman's World magazine

Just a quick post to say that a romance story of mine, 'Love is in the Air,' is in this week's (the July 16th) issue of Woman's World magazine.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Karate and writing

Welcome to my blog, where the Monday updates come on a Tuesday.

Last week I talked about the importance of writing everyday. This post is a bit similar to that, in that it is also about putting in the hours and not giving up. The last week or two has been pretty spotty when it comes to my 'write every day' vow. There was an out-of-town anime convention one weekend and a best friend's wedding the next. On top of that I took on some extra shifts at work to make up for the hours I lost going to these things, so all in all I've been pretty busy and it's thrown my schedule out of whack.


Tuesday, July 3, 2012

On the Importance of Writing Every Day

In my last post I mentioned that one of my new goals was to write every day. This might seem like an obvious goal, and in a way it is: a writer writes. You need to put in the hours to produce even crap, let alone something worth reading. Writing every day will get your story down quicker than, say, writing only every second Tuesday but only when there's a full moon.

But for me it's more than just getting things done. It's about training the mind. Let me explain by talking about roller coasters.