I know no better way to celebrate Valentine's Day than to share how I met my Valentine almost twenty-five years ago and how we snuck up on commitment. (This true story also appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Married Life!: 101 Inspirational Stories about Fun, Family, and Wedded Bliss ) Happy Valentine's Day my lovely Ann. “Your task is not to seek for love, but to find the barriers in yourself that you have built against [...]
The internet is a cornucopia of useful and valuable resources for writers with many of them being free. One of my favorites is the Writing Excuses Podcast (Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.) Truth is, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor, Mary Robinette Kowal and their many guests are quite smart when it comes to writing. They also know that other writers typically have ADD so fifteen minutes is [...]
I find the concept of serendipity to be fascinating though often not well understood. According to Richard Eyre in his stellar book, Spiritual Serendipity: Cultivating and Celebrating the Art of the Unexpected, serendipity is "that quality of mind which, through awareness, sagacity, and good fortune, allows one to frequently discover something good while seeking something else." You could even say that serendipity is the counter-balance to discipline that I wrote about here. As writers, being in [...]
We were originally called the Project Purpose Writing Team but then, when we outgrew that name, we became the Visionary Writers On Purpose Team. We met weekly on the phone via teleconferencing and we'd share our writing projects, our successes, our failures, and our breakthroughs. We varied in number from a half dozen to a dozen or more scattered all over the country (including Canada). And we wrote. We wrote magazine articles. We wrote poetry. Several [...]
In two weeks one of the largest, most fun, and challenging writing opportunities will begin -- NaNoWriMo. And if you happen to be a writer who's been sleeping under a rock for the past several years and think I just spoke a word of Klingon, NaNoWriMo actually stands for National Novel Writing Month. That month is November. And now is the time to prepare for it. You see, the aim of NaNoWriMo is simple - complete a 50,000 [...]
I've started a new series that is cataloged under "The Writer's Life" that explores some of the qualities and attributes I believe are important to becoming a visionary writer (and overall effective human being). And, of course, being one of the founders of Life On Purpose Institute, Inc. I feel called to explore this one early on: Purpose Now, I've gone into quite a bit of detail about the role of purpose in a writer's life [...]
I confess, I've never bought a lottery ticket; least not that I can remember. The odds just seem too high for it to make sense to my frugal mind. However, I'm playing a new writing game that feels a bit like buying a lottery ticket, and thinking of it that way is actually quite empowering. Here's the game, compliments of a blog post of Dean Wesley Smith. (You can read his post here.) While I've been [...]
As part of my series on the qualities and attributes I feel are important to develop in ourselves that will help us in becoming visionary writers (and effective human beings), today I'd like to examine the quality of discipline. As I often do when I start making a new distinction, I like to look up the current definition of the term. Here's how the Miriam-Webster dictionary defines discipline: punishment obsolete : instruction a field [...]
Before becoming a writer and life coach, I practiced veterinary medicine in High Point, North Carolina. In 1984, I began hearing about a new computer called the Macintosh. Being an Apple computer enthusiast, I decided one Saturday to visit the local Apple store and check out this new toy. Twenty minutes later, thanks to a nice (and very attractive) sales lady (no her name wasn’t Fate), I strolled out with my first Macintosh, a printer, and [...]
It struck me as one of those 'duh moments.' You know the kind. After you have this kind of an idea, you wonder why you hadn't thought of it before. They're like the commercials that used to be on TV - "Duh, I coulda had a V-8." The idea that landed in my pea-size brain over the weekend was the idea to explore (including through writing about it) the subject of inspiration. What is [...]
