The past couple of days, I’ve been with my sons at their Taekwondo tournament. Athletes from all over the world gathered to compete in an array of events, including board breaking, traditional and creative forms (see the first video – my son is the one on the right), and team events. First thing on…
Have you noticed this trend, especially in sci-fi or superhero movies? I think I first noticed it with Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy. But after that, I started noticing it other places. How about Darth Vader? Or even the “queen” dragon in How to Train Your Dragon. I’m not talking about motivations, or back…
Can a writer plagiarize their own work? Because I kinda managed to do that. It wasn’t a whole story or a premise or a character. It was a short setting description. I knew the moment I wrote it in my current work-in-progress that I’d written it before. It was a favorite line. Seeing as I…
My birthday is in a few days, and I only want one thing. Seeing as it conveniently overlaps with everyone’s reflecting on the past year, this should be easy. Here goes. If you read a book you loved this year, go to its Amazon and/or Goodreads page and write a review for it. That’s it.…
Sixteen days ago, I went out to dinner with some friends. One of them told me about a TED talk she’d seen about how long it takes to learn a skill. We were talking about the 10,000 hours to achieve mastery statistic, I think, and my friend disagreed. “Twenty hours to proficiency,” she said. Yeah,…
I have an alter-ego on Twitter. Her name is Bad Writer. She doesn’t have a million followers or viral tweets or anything like that. She exists merely to be the public face of my sarcastic side. And since I talk to writers a lot on Twitter, she focuses on writing. Since her creation in July,…
I participate in a Twitter chat called #TweepWriter. It’s a community where writers answer a different question every day throughout the month. Today was day 20, so this was the question: What was the first thing (poem, short story, book, blog post, etc) you ever wrote about? I think I misunderstood the question because I…
