I struggle to visualize characters interacting inside of a space. There, I said it! My spatial reasoning is poor. Given a description of a set of objects, and a change to apply to one or more of those objects, I usually can’t tell you the end result off the top of my head. I must draw or act things out to arrive at the answer. In my college programming courses, I filled notebooks with sketches of arrays and registers, and…
I love watching The Joy of Painting at the end of a long day. Bob Ross is relaxing, entertaining, and has much wisdom to offer artists of all stripes. Near completion of a painting, one of his favorite bits of advice is, “Now, don’t fiddle this to death.” You risk ruining your happy little trees by endlessly tweaking and fussing over them. The same thing applies when we writers put on our editing caps. We second-guess word choice and sentence…
(Image credit: Imagebase.net) For most of my life- a few years excepted- Sundays have been plagued with a gnawing sense of dread. Monday’s coming. Back to school or work. Assignments I don’t want to do, meetings to slog through, people I don’t want to deal with. No matter how sunny the weather or what fun activities are planned for the day, I never fully relax with Monday sitting right there, ready to swallow me up in another week. I feel…
(Image credit: imagebase.net) A writer logs a huge portion of his or her life at desk, computer, and notebook. Everyone dreams about stories, but only by spending months grinding through sentence after sentence, thinking and rethinking, obsessing, anguishing, tearing down and throwing up, does a story or a book actually come into existence. We’re all too aware of those who dream, but never put in the effort. We’re all too aware of the games procrastination plays with us. When we…