[This post was originally published a few months ago but I wanted to resurrect it because (if you couldn’t tell) I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump and thought it best to revisit my bad habits in order to create some good ones.] There’s a troubling dichotomy that exists in the mind of a writer between thinking what …
A few weeks ago, I received word I was selected to be a member of the 2018 Forbes Communications Council. It was a huge honor and a bit of a dream-come-true moment for me, so I figured I should probably repost my first Forbes.com article right here for all of you to read. You’ve stuck with me since the beginning …
Just because you’re a needle in a haystack or a pea beneath a thick mattress doesn’t mean that needle-you won’t be found or pea-you can’t be felt. Here’s the proof: A few days ago I received a surprising email from Michelle, the self-proclaimed Chief Semicolon Advocate at WordPress; I use the site to host this very blog and Michelle’s email went …
We met in the most unexpected way. And while I guess great love affairs do often spring from the auspiciously unusual, I’d suspect none involve quite so much dog poop as this. In the thick of Sunset Boulevard, just a hint from The Standard hotel, there’s a little dog park chiseled into a hill, accessible by two sets of stairs guarded at …
A note before I begin … Dear little word studio readers, I apologize to you for the lack of blog posts this past week. All I can really say is: things happen. Not particularly good or bad things, just things. And when they do happen, it seems a mind can shut off amid all the jarring thingyness surrounding it, unwilling …
I apologize in advance for what I write here today. You should know this final installment in the “On Writing, On Wednesday” series is the result of my meandering mind, which woke me at 4:34 a.m. with words I needed to jot down in the notes app of my iPhone lest I fall back asleep, get up in the (more …
“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.” – John Lennon The minute you start writing for anyone other than yourself is the minute you lose the kind of authenticity that will make your writing great. Pleasing …
There’s a troubling dichotomy that exists in the mind of a writer between thinking what you’ve just crafted is the most brilliant prose to brush against the blank page and wanting to run so far away from your own writing you reach a distant land where words don’t exist and people communicate using only their left eyebrow.
My hut on the island has no windows, no doors, no light except for the coarse glow of a computer screen, blank and lonely as I am though my mind is hardly blank. The words fall past my fingertips, swirling like an inexorable tropical tempest fed by sadness, the eye of it ringed by fury, the edges by rejection. Yet …
This is stupid. That’s the first thing I thought when the idea came to me to write about writing, which seemed no different from a balloon maker noodling up a poodle figurine at a circus side show and instead of selling it to the five-year-old cotton-candy-eater who wants one, telling the kid exactly how the thing was made. The child …