Category: Blog
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The Hokey Pokey
One of the best, and sometimes the worst, things about being a writer is having a very active imagination. How often do you meet someone for the first time, or overhear a piece of a conversation, and immediately withdraw from the world around you to concoct a story or poem in your mind? This happened to me…
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Why Wait?
Be honest – how many of you are keeping to your News Year Resolutions? If you’ve already quit, don’t worry – I’m not judging. I didn’t set a single one. Oh, there’s definitely room for improvement. I’ve got some pretty lazy habits. Some hard-to-ignore personality quirks that are only going to get worse and worse…
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So Long, and Thanks for the Memories
Well, here we are – we’ve finally reached the end of this dreadful year. Maybe 2021 will be a better year for you. Maybe it’ll just be more of the same kind of monotonous drudgery and utter bullshit that 2020 smeared all over our faces. Maybe it’ll be the kind of year that makes you…
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On Writing: The Importance of Word Limits
I don’t know if I’m in the minority here, but I love word limits. When I’m writing based on contest or submission guidelines, my process is to write everything I want, and then go back in with the Word Limit Sieve and shake out all the excess. Then, when I’ve hit that mark (usually just a word…
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No Strangers Here
It’s an amazingly small world we live in, isn’t it? If you didn’t know it before, just hop on Facebook and go through all your friends to see which mutual friends you share. It’s ok; it’s Facebook – if you’re not snooping on people, you’re doing it wrong. Thanks to Facebook, I know that a…
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Quitting
I am proud to say that I am a quitter. Two years ago I made the decision to not buy another pack of cigarettes, a few months after that, I began to see an improvement in my breathing, and just recently I began to actually like that I made this decision. I had my first…
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On Reading: Can You Handle the Suspense?
We are post-Thanksgiving, so it is now officially okay to discuss the upcoming holidays. Whatever your religious persuasion may or may not be, this month is probably going to send waves of stress crashing over you, followed by undertows of guilt. Why oh why did I have to pick the boss’s name for Secret Santa?…
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On Writing: Handling Criticism
Recently, I asked a friend to take a look at a poem I had written. I don’t write poetry very often (I average two a year), but I was pretty proud of this one. So proud I thought I might try to submit it somewhere, and I’ve submitted exactly one thing in the last two…
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On Writing: How’s NaNoWriMo Going for You?
Today marks the halfway point of National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. By now, some of you are patting yourselves on the back in between gulps of your fourth cup of room-temperature coffee and going, “By George, I think I’ve got this!” Others of you are re-calculating just how many thousands of words a day…
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On Writing: A Gift to Your Future Self
When I sat down to write something for this blog, I had to flip through page after page of my daughter’s doodles to search for a clean sheet. (I’m organized enough to pre-plan my blog posts, but not organized enough to keep clean paper on my desk.) I was nearing the end and had almost…
Kate the Writer 