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Are These Your Goals?
Happy Monday, Reader, Last week I asked you to do something uncomfortable. I asked you to look at where you actually are, halfway through the year, and count everything. The craft books that changed how you think about dialogue. The feedback that cracked something open. The week you spent wrestling with a scene that wouldn’t…
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What I Planned vs. What I Built (And What I’m Doing About The Gap)
Happy Monday, Reader, We are about to crossed the halfway point of the year, and I want to tell you something I don’t normally do. I’m going to show you my goals. The real ones, the ones I set back in January when the year still felt like a wide open road and I still…
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How to Actually Change the Thought (Not Just Survive It)
Happy Friday, Reader, We’ve covered a lot of ground this month. We talked about the myth of readiness, how the feeling of not being prepared enough is a moving target that never actually arrives anywhere. We looked at how perfectionism disguises itself as something reasonable, something that looks like diligence and care from the outside…
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Why Not Feeling Ready Never Stops Life From Happening
You’ve been waiting to feel ready. But what if readiness never comes? In this post, I’m breaking down the exact cognitive loop that keeps writers stuck — from impostor syndrome and self-doubt to the avoidance that looks like diligence. If you’ve ever told yourself I need to learn more before I start, this one’s for…
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How Perfectionism Disguises Itself as Responsibility
Perfectionism doesn’t look like fear — it looks like responsibility. It’s the reason writers spend hours perfecting one line while the rest of the manuscript sits untouched. In this post, I’m breaking down the perfectionism trap: why your brain uses it to keep you safe, how it quietly reinforces writer’s block, and what it actually…
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What “I need to Learn More” Really Means for Writers
Most writers have a story they keep meaning to get back to — the one that’s been “almost ready” for months. But readiness isn’t practical. It’s emotional. In this post, I introduce the REBT framework and explain how one irrational thought creates the fear, avoidance, and self-doubt that keep writers stuck before they even begin.…
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The self-editing blind spot
You can read your own manuscript a dozen times and still miss the gaps — because your brain fills them in automatically. In this post, I explore why writers can’t always catch their own inconsistencies, what workshop feedback taught me about seeing the story you actually wrote versus the one in your head, and why…
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What you wrote vs. what you think you wrote
Your brain fills in gaps automatically — which means you can miss inconsistencies in your own manuscript even after reading it a dozen times. In this post, I break down reverse outlining: what it is, why it works, and how tracking what’s actually on the page (instead of what you remember writing) can save you…
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What happens when you’re too close to your own story
When you know your story too well, you stop seeing what’s actually there. Here’s how writers catch what memory misses. Continue Reading What happens when you’re too close to your own story
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The Fragile Alliance: Building Reader Trust through Consistent Storytelling
Inconsistency in a story rarely announces itself. It builds quietly, detail by detail, until the reader is no longer inside the narrative but standing just outside of it, watching instead of feeling. As a reader and an early reader for other writers, I’ve seen how even small contradictions can slowly erode the trust that holds…
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