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and reflecting on my time there in this blog post, I found my biggest takeaway was hearing why writers—published and unpublished—feel compelled to write.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 …

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 …

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, …

Inktober 2016

It's Inktober! Woot! Woot! I actually took time and came up with 31 drawing prompts. No guarantee I'll keep up with them all but it was fun making the list! For those looking for prompts you're welcome to follow mine. The list on the left is of little things that should be drawn big. The …

Frankenstein Fish

Blogging is like having an aquarium, but without lives at stake. Let me start at the beginning. You decide to get a fish tank. Why? Because you like fish and you got mad fishy-ideas! You’re ready for the world to see your awesome fish-abilities! You pick out a tank that suits your needs, you get …

When Ideas Come Knockin’

I really want to focus on my life, but I haven’t written in a week and the creative ideas are coming for me. That’s right. Not to me but for me. There’s this box in my brain where I store all my potential story ideas. But it seems the box’s lid has come loose. And …