Podcast

How do you write a book when you’re not a writer? Well, you become one. In this solo episode, I share my thoughts on how one becomes a writer and begins to embrace and act on that identity. See this blog post if you’d prefer to “read” this episode. Here’s what I discuss in this solo episode:…

My guest on this week’s episode, Amy S. Peele, started writing in mid-life after working through The Artist’s Way and discovering that she loves to write. It took a few more years to become an author as she was also working full time in her thirty-five-year career as a nurse in the organ transplant field.…

In this episode, I share my own looking back process as well as a key lesson around expectations and my writing that I’ve learned and how it’s shifted my writing practice this fall and moving forward into 2022. After the past few weeks of looking back at 2021, confirming my own personal findings with a…

Bringing mindfulness to your writing practice helps develop consistency in your practice, and it can also make you a more descriptive writer as you slow down and notice more. We dive into all of this more with today’s guest, author Lissa M. Cowan who writes in a variety of genres and teaches fiction and structural…

Welcome to a fun chat about writing, developing characters, and finding inspiration with women’s fiction author Elizabeth Sumner Wafler. Like many of us, Elizabeth came to writing as a second career and has mined her own life for inspiration for both her plots and her characters. While our intent in this conversation was to focus…

The first pages of a book are so incredibly important to pulling a reader into your story, so they keep turning pages. How do you hook them? You include the 4 C’s and a Q which I break down in this episode. I also share specific examples from best-selling novels to model these five key…

We often think of creativity in terms of the thing that we’re creating, but in this episode with poet and creativity activator David Chislett, you might have your understanding of creativity deepened and even turned inside out and upside down. As David says, what the thing becomes is irrelevant. The idea is to just start,…

We live in an Amazon Prime, Netflix, fast food, “I want it NOW” kinda world. Life moves fast, and when we decide we want something, we generally can get it fairly quickly. No more waiting for a movie to come out or the VHS to get or checking to see if it’s been returned to…

Loss, heartache, major life changes, pain are all part of the human condition. Nobody escapes dealing with the hard and painful stuff. My guest this week, novelist Piper Punches, works through her heartache on the page and through her characters that somehow end up navigating similar challenges to what she’s navigating. She’s done this both…

My guest this week didn’t set out to become an author. He intended to keep a daily journal to document his journey to becoming a dad. But it was his dedicated journal practice and his desire to read about other men becoming Dad’s (stories he couldn’t find) that led him to shape his journals into…