Category: Blog
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On Writing: Is It Okay to Sin Now?
When one of my dear friends moved away a couple years ago, she Marie Kondo-ed her house and came across a few books that she thought I would enjoy. The first, a non-fiction account of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition which was marred by the H.H. Holmes murders, looked promising. The second, an award-winning science…
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On Writing: Who Are You Writing For?
Several years ago, I had to give my 9-year old son a little pep talk. For about a year he had been trying to design a trading card game, in the same vein as Pokémon. He had started, and quit, about five different versions, and during a conversation about why he had not cleaned his…
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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…
Kate the Writer 