Seven Steps for a Productive NaPiBoWriWee

It’s April and since we’re trapped indoors with our thoughts, now’s a good time to start prepping for NaPiBoWriWee! What’s NaPiBoWriWee, you ask? It’s a writing challenge called National Picture Book Writing Week that's held during the first week of May where participants write seven picture book manuscripts in seven days. NaPiBoWriWee was founded by the …

Five Steps for Setting Achievable Goals

January is a natural time for making resolutions and setting new goals. As someone with a large appetite for creative projects, I find setting goals for myself to be an invigorating and entertaining process, but following through with these goals is much less exciting. Acknowledging this about myself led me to the question at the …

Fifty Reasons Why I Write

After attending and participating in the 2018 Kweli Color of Children's Literature conference and reflecting on my time there in this blog post, I found my biggest takeaway was hearing why writers—published and unpublished—feel compelled to write. Anyone can do it, in the sense that you don’t need a degree to buy a notebook, find …

The Seven Stages of Process: My Time at the 2018 Kweli Color of Children’s Literature Conference

The afternoon before the Kweli conference, anxiety bubbled within me like bad gas. By that night it was a furious boil complete with heartburn and sweating. Despite the many weeks I spent preparing the for event, the thought of sitting on one panel in the morning and moderating my first panel ever that afternoon was …

Putting the Fun Back in Functional: Maximizing and Customizing Your Desk Space

Whether you’re moving into a brand-new work space or looking for a few ways to revamp the space you’re already in, this blog post will provide a few tips and tricks that have proved useful to me when organizing and customizing my desk space.     My first time working in an office setting was …

Blogs, Banners, and Big Changes

These last few months I’ve been giving my blog a facelift. I played around with about a dozen different color schemes in a dozen different templates. Widgets were added, moved, deleted, and added again. And my About Me page has undergone extensive editing.  Why so much fuss?  Well, in retrospect, I realized that I was …

Writing with Bleed: Thoughts on Creating Short Stories

In illustration, bleed is art that goes beyond the edge of where the page will be trimmed. This ensures that the art will cover the entire page. By illustrating with bleed, artists make the art bigger than it needs to be. The same can be said of short story writers. In the short story The …

The Baby in the Bathwater

Below is an original short story inspired by a writing prompt from the Amazing Story Generator. The prompt reads: After a failed bank heist, the drummer for a punk rock band, refuses to leave the bathtub. Enjoy! Even from under water, Zed knew the peculiar jingle of Ava’s keys. The sounds of the apartment door’s …

Clouds of Doubt

There’s a time and place for everything, even in writing. In each of my writer’s notebooks I designate pages (places) for everything. I have a Favorite words page where new vocabulary I acquire, like “Nepotism”, can collect and mingle with old favorites like “tinged”. My weekly goals page is decked out with color-coded post-its dividing …

The Amazing Story Generator

I came across this awesome title at the New York Public Library Store on Fifth Ave about two years ago. It's called The Amazing Story Generator and yes, it is amazing. Inside this spiral notebook are three sets of pages. The top page supplies a setting or inciting event, the middle page provides a protagonist, …