Join an internationally bestselling children's book author and her down-home husband and their dogs as they try to live a happy, better life by being happier, better people . You can use those skills in writing and vice versa. But we’re not perfect, just like our podcast. We’re cool with that.
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Long before Carrie Bradshaw penned a column about Sex and The City or Bridget Jones had a diary, New Yorker and hopeless romantic Melissa Braverman was writing about the search for love. In this limited series podcast, the acclaimed Single Gal In The City blogger shares excerpts from 100-plus personal diaries. From high school crushes to heartbreak, Melissa bares it all.
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The host, Carrie Hope Fletcher, discusses in detail the books she reads and has created her own five star rating to determine how much she liked them.
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Growth. Brand. Community. We want to show marketers and business owners how to holistically grow their brands via a variety of avenues - from organic SEO to social outreach, email marketing, and paid advertising. We'll help you understand how a great online community can help you expand your audience, create content, add links to your website, and book more business for your company.
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Everybody Hates Self-Publishing explores the good, the bad and the ugly of creating and producing your own work. Self-published authors will find advice on writing, book marketing and getting your book in bookstores. Aspiring writers will learn about being an indie publisher: Being an entrepreneur, creating your own DIY publishing house and thriving as an indie publisher means connecting with readers, booksellers and librarians and competing in a market that favors traditional publishing. Ho ...
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From the makers of Carry On Up The Missus, Carry On Up The Village and Quantum Of Missus comes a 50th anniversary celebration of all things Monty Python
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Writers talking to writers about the problems, processes, and creative solutions that unify us all.
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Show, Don’t Tell, Baby Face Cutie Pie Cutie
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We talked about this a long while ago, and I've revisited it, too, but it's time, my writing friends, to revisit it. So in writing one of the biggest tips that you start hearing starts in around third grade and it’s “SHOW DON’T TELL.” And it’s sound writing advice, but it’s pretty sound life advice, too. How many of us have heard the words, “I love…
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What Do Readers Want and the Kentucky Meat Shower Incident
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Readers want questions that they’ll get answers to. They want to be hooked along. They want to unwrap the answer the way people unwrap a birthday present. That’s what Robert Prince says, anyway, writing in his class at the University of Alaska,”The key to understanding what audiences really want in a story is to understand that the audience doesn’t…
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The Elements of Storytelling: The Atomic Bomb Test
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Author, podcaster and professor Robert Prince has this thing he does when he watches a movie: the Atomic Bomb test. “After I’ve watched about 20 minutes of the film I ask myself, ‘If an atomic bomb were to go off and destroy everyone in this film, would I care all that much?’ If the answer is no, I don’t keep watching the film,” he says in his clas…
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Brainstorming . . . Even the word sounds a little creepy. Like there is a storm inside your brain. It sounds... It sounds sort of violent and hazardous and windy. In this podcast, we talk about the storms inside our brain and how those storms can become story ideas. Five Ways To Get Story Ideas Some authors have a really hard time just getting an i…
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Setting is where your story happens. It’s the time period. It’s the physical place. You can have more than one setting. There. That’s the definition. We’re all good, right? Wrong. Let’s really talk about setting. WHAT SETTING DOES Setting is the foundation of your story. It is the ModPodge that has an addictive smell (Cough. Not addicted to ModPodg…
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Algonquin Young Readers Will End in September The traditional book publishing world is a bit like the wild west if the cowboys wore pink-framed eyeglasses and could quote Derrida. People are heroes. People are let go. Entire divisions of publishing houses close. And so on. And this continues this week with the changes at Hachette Book Group and its…
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How To Write a Book Description That Gets Readers Tingling All Over
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Our podcast title is “How To Write a Book Description That Gets Readers Tingling All Over” and that just sounds naughty, doesn’t it? And it is a little naughty because this, my friends, is about selling a book, your book, and that requires being a little bit sexy. Sexy is something I, Carrie, am very very bad at. Let’s start by thinking about it th…
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Pinch, there it is; googly eyes on the train, and yes, we are on our 37th career this year
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Dogs are Smarter Than People/Write Better Now Last week, we talked about pinch points both on the podcast and on the blog, and honestly? Nobody seemed super into it, but we’re finishing up this week. This post is going to be a bit more about the first part of act two of a three-act story, focusing on the time from the first pinch point to the midpo…
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There are some things in the writing world that don’t make a ton of sense in the world of regular humans. One of those things is pinch points. This podcast episode is going to be the start of a quick series of podcasts and regular posts about pinch points. The regular posts will be at our Substack LIVING HAPPY under the WRITE BETTER NOW publication…
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Just an Hour a Day Makes You More Bad Ass
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There are a lot of people who advocate spending just an hour a day doing something to become awesome. That hour a day is often learning. You study up about what you want to do, you self learn, you teach yourself to be better by learning all about the thing you're into. So, if you're into writing, you read books about writing and actual books. You s…
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Fighting, Commerce, and Ten-Cent Beer: Welcome to America and How to Frame Stories
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On last week’s podcast and the one a few before that, and in a post, Shaun and I talked a bit about plot structures and narrative structures and how here in the U.S. we think of these usually (not always!) as pretty linear, and pretty much in a three-act framework (think beginning, middle, end) with rising stakes and drama as you go along. This is …
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Pot Plants Invade Wisconsin and Alternate That Plot Structure
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Last week, maybe a week ago, maybe 82 years ago, who knows, we talked about alternative plot structures. Much of American film and novels is built on what's considered to be the classic three-act structure, which basically goes beginning-middle-end, and there's this rising line of the plot. It ends up looking like a bit of a triangle. As readers, w…
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No cow cuddles, no brain worms: Do you want to be happy?
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Do you want to be happy? It’s a question philosopher Sebastian Purcell asks his students every year. Do you want to be happy? For Purcell being happy has a lot in common with living a good life, “The Stoic answer to this question, that the good life consists in flourishing (eudaimonia), has seen a resurgent interest that is indicative of a cultural…
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Celestial Bodies, Sexy Knees and Story Structure via Robert McKee
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You can learn a lot about culture by how it looks at what makes a good story and a good story structure. In Western culture right now, we tend to think of stories as three acts (a beginning, middle, and end with the bulk being in the middle), and with a protagonist or hero or main character (whatever you want to call it) who drives the story forwar…
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It ended up being a bit of a free-for-all as we talked about the strange things people do sometimes. SHOUT OUT TO STUBHY! The snippet of our intro and outro music is only a snippet of this guy’s awesome talent. Many thanks to Kaustubh Pandav. You can check out a bit of his work at the links below. www.luckyboysconfusion.Net or www.Facebook.com/mrms…
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How Not to be a Butt-Hole in Real Life and on the Page
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So building a sympathetic character on the page is a lot like being a sympathetic character in real life. This sympathetic character is basically the opposite of a butt-hole. There’s this great post on the SocialSelf blog that talks about what makes people likable and what keeps people from being likeable. And writers can learn from this, really. T…
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Someone was sleeping outside her tent right next to her and how to make good writing habits
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A lot of writers that I work with have a problem. The problem is that they want to be a writer, but before they come to me? They don’t write. Here’s the thing. For a lot of us, we have to make time to be a writer. That’s just how our brains and process work. There are some writers who manage to get 10 days of alone time and writer time and they pow…
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We found a topic! It ended up mostly being about poop and creepiness and three-foot tall humanoids. Links we mention: https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-forest-ranger-stories/amandasedlakhevenerBy Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar
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Being an author or an artist or almost anyone is about navigating. You have to walk a fine line with criticism and praise, discern what's real and what's not, what matters or not, what is noise and what is important. And sometimes? Well, sometimes we only hear and dwell on the one negative thing that someone has said to us or written about us even …
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Why it is okay to read books you’ve already read and sometimes there’s an alligator in your kitchen
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Here's our main premise this week: it's okay to read books you've already read. Not only is it okay. It's helpful. This is true for both writers and normal humans. Rereading books gives you: New ideas Reminds you of ideas you'd forgotten about Let's you notice new things because you aren't the same you who read that book the last time. DONALD LATUM…
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The Spiral of Ick and Quiet Winners: You Don’t Have to Flaunt Yourself to Succeed
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Recently, I read an interview with an author who talked about how much children loved her book and how they tell her this. It annoyed me. It may have been good marketing, but it sure didn't feel like good human-ing, you know? When you're interviewed by a reporter or when you do a school visit, as a children's book author, you have the ability to to…
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Shaun went off the rails, but this was supposed to be about how do you sustain a career as an author
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This is obviously not the full transcript. You have to listen to hear the full weirdness, but . . . here's the core. How Do You Sustain a Career as an Author? It's a really good question, right? One, all of us authors are trying to figure out. Rise With Drew writes, "Creative careers are slippery. One-hit wonders abound, but fewer are enduring supe…
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The Info Dump from Hell and How to Avoid Them and Also UFOs
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Talking about show vs tell at the scene level is a little bit harder than talking about it at the paragraph and scene levels. But it’s also a tiny bit easier. When you’re looking for telling at this level of the story, what you’re looking for is a couple of things: A butt ton of backstory. A butt ton of info dumps A lot of flashback. You can have b…
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Control Your Tells, Don’t Give In To the Passive
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Babe, I know you don’t want to talk about showing vs telling any longer, our massive series, but it’s really really important. It’s sunk many a cool book idea, stopped others in its tracks. It is a chaos agent in the life of many a good writer. And there are so many damn facets to it. I could fill a year of podcasts talking about it. Don’t worry, I…
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Award-winning author of YA novels? Check. Printz honor author, ALA Best Book winner, National Book Award finalist? Check. Has a middle grade coming out March 11 that's about to rock the world? Definitely. Was so cool that Carrie was afraid to talk to him back in 2005 or 2006 or something? You know it. Chris Lynch, award winning human and ridiculous…
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LET’S SHOW YOU HOW SHOW VS TELL WORKS! Florida Man Poops on a Possum. We won’t show you that
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Hey! Welcome to our series of podcasts and posts all about showing vs. telling, which we are on fire about right now, right Shaun? Growls. You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her blog, https://carriejonesbooks.blog/ So, a lot of my writers have a brain like mine, which is sa…
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RELATED TO MONSTERS AND WRITERS, GET INTO THE READER’S BRAIN IF YOU WANT TO SHOW AND NOT TELL
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We’re continuing with our monster “Show Don’t Tell” series of podcasts and posts. So, hey! Welcome to our series of podcasts and posts all about showing vs. telling, which we are on fire about right now, right Shaun? Growls. You can check out the rest of the series on Carrie’s Substack Write Better Now or just the podcast episodes on her website. A…
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THE PROBLEM WITH ADVERBS & BEARS IN THE DOGGY DOOR: Let’s Show, Not Tell.
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We’re continuing with our monster “Show Don’t Tell” series of podcasts and posts. Adverbs are a big place where you tell and not show. So, if I wrote, “You are the sexiest manatee in the world,” Ham-Ham said hopelessly. Would you think that works? Would you feel how Ham-Ham said it hopelessly? Janice Hardy is brilliant and she has a really simple w…
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Show Us Your Wounds Writers and Stealing Seven King Cakes
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There’s this really great book for writers by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi called The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. It came out way back in 2017. As they write in their prologue, “Life is painful, and not all the lessons we learn are positive ones. As with you and me, the characters in our stories have suffered emotional trauma that cannot easily…
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Promises, Promises, Writers Promise Readers a Lot Plus a Screech Owl Chilling With Board Games
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Writers Are Promise Makers Writers are promise makers. We tell our readers that we’re going to give them something just because of the cultural expectations that happen when someone opens our books. What do we promise them? We promise a character The book is about someone. We reveal different aspects about that character as we show them act or reac…
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TROPE ME OUT, BABY: THE JUMP SCARE AND JANUARY IS A BLISSED OUT MONTH
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There’s a lot of ways that trope is defined, but for us here on DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE, we’re going with the Grammarist’s definition, which is: “A trope is simply a common or recurring theme or method used in storytelling across all forms of media. Tropes serve as a way for creators to convey certain ideas and messages to their audience in a …
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Hate Hard, the Beer Poems, and Building the Life You Want
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I’ve been going through holes of Reels and short-form videos at night lately, watching people remodel their house or home, decorate for holidays, and then, um, being an Amazon affiliate. At the same time, a lot of the writers I work with are having BIG DOUBT MOMENTS as they query and read Twitter/X and see authors behaving badly or agents behaving …
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Dig Deep and Baby Owl in the Christmas Tree
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How to Dig Deeper in Your Scenes A lot of time, a writer will get feedback and it’ll say something vague-ish like, “Dig deeper.” And then the author cries or gets angry or feels an emotion that no author wants to feel. The thing is that this advice is sort of vague, but what it usually means is: 1. You have no setting in your scene or chapter or st…
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WHY YOU WANT TO NOT USE ING VERBS AND IF I WERE A FISH IS THE BEST SONG EVER
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When I was a baby newspaper reporter, one of my editors, Grady Holloway, used to call me over to his desk. A lot. I loved Grady. He had this great, grizzly beard before it was cool, wore a dirty hat, had been married to an ambassador’s daughter, rode horses, drove cab in Colorado when all the beat poets and journalists were out there, and liked noi…
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Random Life Advice: Let’s Look At Each Other
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When I go to classrooms on book tour or for school visits, teachers (or kids prompted by teachers) always ask me what the most important skill is for being a writer. And I tell them a couple things. No, it’s not about what a comma splice is or the coolness of objective correlatives. It’s really a two part answer: Notice what people are doing, their…
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A Simple Trick to Write Better: Get Rid of the Nods
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When I help writers with their stories, a lot of the times one of the things I tell them is that they need to dig more deeply. They need to dig more deeply into the emotion and feel it with the characters. They need to dig more deeply into the scene and see the characters there, interacting with their surroundings and each other. And a lot of us wr…
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Dive Into The Conflict and Make Your Book Blurb Sing
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Two weeks ago, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check that out here. And the second step is here. So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to Shayla Raquel is dangling the characters. Then our next step is what Shaun has no proble…
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Baby bears are the new bison and how to write a book blurb
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Last week, we started talking about how to write a book blurb for your story and began with the first step, which is a hook. You can check that out here. So, if the first step is creating that hook, the second step, according to Shayla Raquel is dangling the characters. What does that mean? It means that the thing that propels your story needs to b…
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How to Make Your Book Blurb and Trippy Art About Dragon Intimacy How to Make a Shart Tantalizing?
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I’ve decided it’s time for a new series of podcast now that we whacked character lies down to a mush of sobs. There are all different ways to write these blurbs and make them tantalizing to readers, but there are set steps. We’re going to focus on the first one here. First let’s explain what a book blurb is, right? It’s just the description of your…
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Smuggling Giraffe Poop and Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Character Misbelief is Hot When You Write Novels
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So far we’ve talked (and written) twice about character misbeliefs. Then we took a baby break because we’re like that, but we’re back on it now, my friends. Those earlier posts are linked below. First off to recap, the big lie or character misbelief in your story is what motivates them or causes them to act in a certain way. If your character grows…
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It’s a romance brawl. Not really. But it’s a bit of one. And it comes down to this: Does a romance have to have Happily Ever After or Happy For Now to be a romance? Does there need to be a positive, happy ending in order for a book to be a romance? Let’s talk about it. Unspoken agreement with the reader WRITING TIP OF THE POD If your story isn’t ha…
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Neither of Us are Lookers, Seventh Grade Insults and Character Misbeliefs
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On our last podcast and post, we talked about the character misbelief, which is basically what the character in your story believes that isn’t real or true.The big component of this is that your character believes this big lie about life or about themselves because of something that hurt them in the past. The thing that hurt them in the past that c…
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We’re doing a hybrid writing tip and podcast this week. All the important stuff is written down here. All the fun stuff and Shaun aka The Talent is in the podcast where we talk about this important writing stuff and other things. So, let’s get started. The big lie or the character’s misbelief in your story is a major key to your character’s story a…
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It's a weird, wild, not PC live ride into strange storm things as we wait for Hurricane Lee. I tried to keep this podcast on track. I failed. Links We Mention https://www.factretriever.com/hurricane-facts https://bestlifeonline.com/storm-facts/ http://www.theworldgeography.com/2011/04/top-8-weirdest-natural-disasters.html https://news.yahoo.com/7-w…
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Repurpose Spider Hairs, Licking Rocks, and Counting Dead People’s Nose Hairs: Logic Matters and so do the Ig Nobles
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In our random thought we talk all about the Ig Nobles. We don't transcribe that, so you'll have to listen. Sorry! But now, let’s talk about logic. When you are writing a novel and something doesn’t make sense—let’s say someone has brown eyes on page 2 and blue eyes on page 1—your editor if you have one is going to call you on that. If they don’t ca…
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Chuck Wendig has a piece on his blog, Terrible Minds, called "Series vs Standalone: Cage Match," which shows that Wendig is great at blog headlines and marketing. But his riff on a BlueSky conversation between a lot of writer elite. And it’s why he’s writing standalones mostly from now on instead of a series. Quickly, his reasons are: "Writing a se…
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A poem for Monday!By Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar
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This week we tried to take a deep dive into the strange, but basically just told four stories. God only knows what went wrong, honestly. LINKS WE MENTION: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8htqnq/what_strange_thing_have_you_witnessedexperienced/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Weird/By Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar
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Brave Fart and Florida Man, Let’s Talk About How Anger is Not The Enemy for Writers and Other Humans
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So, a lot of self-help out there on TikTok and blogs is all about being . . . Well, happier, more efficient, better humans. We explore this all the time ourselves as we try to lead better lives, but one of the big things about this is that it sort of makes it seem like we live in a bubble where only we exist, that if we just work harder, better, mo…
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How to Stay Motivated Even If You’re a Writer
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How to Stay Motivated Even If You’re a Writer A lot of writers hate writing. They sit and stare at the blank page or screen. They end up posting about how hard writing is, how torturous. Their post will get them a million likes. But it wasn’t always like that for that. Most of us write because at one point we really loved writing. Drawing? The same…
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