The start of the school year is here and with it we have a few crisp fall-weather weeks just bristling with potential. Which means it’s time to pull out all our notebooks and evaluate where we want that potential to take us! I’ve talked about setting goals a decent amount before because it’s one of […]
Quotes and Comments on The Artist’s Way
I’m still working through Julia Cameron’s excellent book The Artist’s Way and have gathered together a few of my favorite quotes and thoughts to share. (You can see a few earlier quotes from last month’s favorite things post!) Now I’ll admit I don’t do every exercise in the book or work through it as consistently […]
New Year, New Beginnings, New Dreams
New year, new goals, fresh starts. What do you want to do this year? Who do you want to be? What do you want to leave behind? I’ve been rethinking goals and priorities and it’s both challenging and refreshing to contemplate changes. What would it look like if we could shape our lives how we […]
Bethany’s Best Reading Lists
Last week I talked about the importance of reading for writers and the various types of benefits books can have. Which got me to thinking about what I’ve been reading lately and what’s on my to-read list! Hopefully we will all be getting a bit of time over the holidays to do some reading, right? […]
Reading Well for Writers
Stephen King has famously said: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” And who are we to argue? Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of getting our writing done, the busyness of upcoming holidays, or the general chaos of everyday life. […]
Writing Habits of Writers
Do you get up before dawn and write first thing in the morning? Do you have a special “writing nook” or space of some sort to work in? Do you write for five minutes at a time or fifty? Writing can look like lots of different things. The tl;dr version is that there is no […]
Making Our Writing Emotional
Strong emotions (especially negative emotions such as grief, failure, and shame) can be uncomfortable. As humans we try to temper and shy away from some of these messier emotions and the undignified moments of life. It shouldn’t surprise us that as writers we sometimes do the same thing. Now, for the record, it’s not necessarily […]
From the Archives: Mental Wellness
This month we’re collecting posts from the archives on some of our biggest topics. Today we’re looking at mental wellness, one half of the blog’s core theme of “writing and wellness.” Mental wellness shouldn’t be seen as optional or an afterthought- it’s actually a very big deal. It’s also a very varied topic, including (just […]
From the Archives: Goals and Dreaming
This month we’re doing a bit of a roundup here on a few different topics. Today we’re talking about goals and a bit about dreaming! Because often dreams and goals go hand in hand 🙂 I like to make big goals and dream big… but then sometimes it’s overwhelming and I make super itty bitty […]
The Importance of the Non-Glamorous
Reading glamorous success stories can be so attractive and addictive. We look at brilliant musicians and say we wish we were gifted like that. We admire great art and lament we aren’t artistic. We read books, view sculptures, gawk at inventions, and marvel at math… and we think we could never do that. We think […]