1) You should be having some degree of fun making your art! If you’re not having fun, try a different medium. Traditional art has always invoked mixed emotions in me but photo manipulation? I love it wholeheartedly! 2) An encouraging voice makes things a lot easier. Even if it’s just…
I’ve been participating in National Novel Writing Month since 2002. I avoided organized groups and even the website itself at that time. Writing was a very solitary endeavor for me as a young woman because it was such a personal thing for me. The idea of sharing my work with…
I got asked recently to write out how I feel about NANO… I both love and loathe NANO. Let me explain why. For the love it column… Dude, I get to read new stories. Ones that are raw, new, and good. Why I loathe it? Because I am masochistic enough…
There is a certain kind of writer who attaches no value to their own work on an emotional level. They write for attention. It’s the same kind of “writer” who dreams of writing a book so they’d be rich and famous. This is also the kind of “writer” who wants…
I could spend a whole year talking about the fetishizing of men in fandom because it is widespread and it leads to some truly ugly behavior on the parts of fans. It breeds contempt for show creators and sometimes obsessions with actors that can and have gotten dangerously out of…
Having one fandom can be isolating. Creatively speaking, the canon of your fandom could and probably will provide a very narrow window of exploration. Especially with a fandom that will have no canon material to offer you. One fandom means, you’ll often gravitate toward siloed spaces for your fandom or…
One of the websites I maintain for fandom is the Wild Hare Project. In the scope of things, it flies under the radar quite a bit, which I prefer as it is a writer-focused archive, and that’s straight-up unicorn circumstances in fandom where every single other archive is geared explicitly…
The writing challenge environment isn’t for everyone. Rough Trade is built on personal accountability—everything about the design of the challenge is focused on providing an environment where authors can stretch and challenge themselves. The basic rules stay the same from one challenge to another while the theme changes to give…
Yesterday, I encountered an old writing acquaintance. I wouldn’t call this person a friend because I usually ever crossed paths with them in large writing groups and more specifically, in the annual library write-ins for National Novel Writing Month. There are different kinds of write-ins during NANO and we’ve discussed…
Writers are born. We spring wholesale from the womb brimming with chaotic inspiration waiting to be unleashed onto the page. Because the desire to write is innate, it can be frustrating and disheartening when life gets in the way of our ability to write. I say “life” because it need…
