Sometimes, despite your best efforts and most earnest intentions, you just don’t make progress in your writing. Not because you’re blocked, or uninspired, or bored, or frustrated, or overwhelmed by whatever it is that you are working on. Sometimes you just can’t. Life, in capital letters, gets in the way. Loved ones get sick. You …
Tag: Advice
The Writing Life: Aiming High Part 4 – What if Nobody Notices?
In earlier episodes of this series I described what aiming high means for me, why missing isn’t failure, and why I think as any kind of artist it is beneficial to strive for more and push your own personal envelope, no matter what medium you work in. Go creatives! These things are all well and …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Aiming High Part 4 – What if Nobody Notices?
The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals
It has been over a month since The Thief and The Demon’s release. A month to reflect on how much work has been done, and realize how much more remains to be done. There is a lot to learn and to do online, social media can be an absorbing maze with a lot of new …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals
The Writing Life: Travel as Inspiration
For a long time I did not travel. My memories of flight were fuzzy – laying my jacket down on the floor and sleeping between the seats on a flight across the Atlantic in 1974. The weird sensation of the ground I walked on not being solid, the vague bounce I had never previously experienced …
The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts
As I’ve said in other articles, I’ve known forever that I would be a writer, and that I would write fantasy stories. Apart from one cathartic journey into writing nursing fiction, which still had elements of the fantastical (how many nurses find themselves talking to the devil and questioning their own sanity?), all of my …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts
The Writing Life: It Takes a Team
I tried for years to transform my writing from manuscript to novel on my own, and for years it did not work. Eventually, I recognized that I needed a team. Only through accepting this, that I was not equipped to do it alone, did I finally flourish…and I intend to do a whole lot more …
My Book has Launched!
The day has finally arrived. Hard to believe after all this time that the work of writing is done, and I am a published author. My book, The Thief and The Demon, is now available for sale as an e-Book and paperback, online at Amazon.com. It still seems crazy to say that. Now that the …
The Writing Life: When Plans Change
I have had many plans in my writing life. Or at least I thought they were plans at the time, when in truth they were more like wish lists. Either way, the imagined path has often gone awry. This blog was originally going to be about dealing with when your writing process gets derailed, or …
The Writing Life: Why Now?
While I’ve always wanted to be a writer, for far too much of my life I wanted to write a first draft, be praised for my creativity, and have that draft magically transformed into a bestseller by some random alchemy that had nothing to do with me working on it myself. I wanted all the …
Roderick T. Macdonald 