New Year’s resolutions! We’ve all made them, we’ve all broken them, and sometimes we’ve even kept them.
The latter is the case when it comes to my 2017 resolution, which was to read more fiction.
I had been asked to join the Ascribe Writers group in the fall of 2016 and as I wrote in a previous blog post, I was pretty green to the world of fiction. Read more
As an agricultural journalist (my full-time writing gig), I am researching all of the time. It’s actually one of the first steps I take when laying out a new piece and I truly enjoy the process. I sometimes even pretend to be a sleuth-solving detective who can’t rest until she finds the exact piece of information she’s looking for. The harder the better; I like a challenge.
That being said, I don’t have a tonne of experience researching as a fiction writer so when I was up to host the May 2017 Ascribe Writers meeting, I chose to do a little more digging on the topic.
Here’s what I found. Read more
“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it people like me!”
For those of you who are fans of Saturday Night Live, you’ll probably recognize that quote from one of the many episodes of ‘Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley’ that ran on the powerhouse comedy show throughout the 1990s.
Comedian Al Franken played Stuart, who in a nutshell, was a pretty insecure dude who dedicated his life to self-help (he was in several 12-step programs but not a licensed therapist as the voice over on his cable network television show explained). Read more
Nineteen ninety-seven. That was probably the last time I sat down and completed what one could call a ‘work of fiction.’ I was in high school and my English teacher would have given me the assignment with strict instructions on word count, theme, and possibly even plot. I had some pretty serious English teachers back in the day (thank goodness). Read more