Blog
Amanda Palmer on Artistic Legitimacy
Musician Amanda Palmer recently gave a keynote at Grub Street Writer’s Muse and the Marketplace Conference. She’s whip smart and really “gets” this brave new world of social media, and so we should always listen to what she has to say. Her talk at Grub was about something much more important than social media: it…
Read MoreErasmus on Writing
Courtesy Grub Street Writers
Read MoreA Failed Bird Rescue Attempt
Saturday morning, I idly looked out my window and saw, as usual, my elderly neighbor Vinnie sitting on his folding chair on the sidewalk doing his sudoku. And then something extraordinary happened–a stunning, yellow cockatiel flew down and landed on the sidewalk not ten feet from him. I watched for a few moments while Vinnie…
Read MoreWelcome Time Management Ninja People!
Happy to have you here! These articles may be of interest: How to Live your Summer Life All Year Long. What To Do if You Have a Tendency to Overgive. Betty Ming Liu Quits Her Job How to Spend Your Weekend (Just in Time!)
Read MoreUseful Apps for Mac and iOS Users
Ph.D. student Reid Leamaster reviews some useful writing productivity apps, including several for taking notes and organizing information. His latest review is an app called Flowstate, which, if you stop writing before the end of your designated interval erases everything you’ve written. Yes, you’ve read that right. Sounds crazy and coercive to me, but…
Read MoreOne of the Best Time Management Pieces I’ve Read
This piece on time management by Jamie Rohrbaugh gets a lot right: “This is the list of priorities I came up with for my life: One-on-one time with God in prayer and personal study. My health and my husband. (I wasn’t married yet, but I was thinking long-term and couldn’t choose between health and…
Read MoreHow to Live Your Summer Life All Year Long
Summer is a time for play, but what does your play tell you about the life you’d really like to be living? Many of us, during the summer: Relax Get more athletic Get more sensual (Shakespeare didn’t write A Midwinter Night’s Dream, after all!) Interact more with nature, and Dress more casually and comfortably,…
Read MoreWriter’s Block is Always Caused and Curable
This essay by Fairfield University professor Elizabeth Boquet on how her writing productivity suffered when she switched from teaching to administration is a perfect illustration of the principles that: 1) procrastination/writers block/underproductivity are always caused (versus being some kind of intrinsic moral flaw like “laziness” or “lack of discipline”); 2) the causes are always outside…
Read MoreIn Defense of Self-Help Books
I’m totally loving this Psychology Today post by Deborah Hill Cone on how it’s snobbish to put down self-help literature: I will come clean. At my grimmest moments I would turn again and again to books which helped change my perspective and get “another way of thinking about life” although they might not be the…
Read MoreNew Parenthood Can Lead to Situational Perfectionism
A new parent writes to syndicated advice columnist Carolyn Hax about how stressful it can be: I’m a new mom of a pretty but challenging 6-month-old boy. I am a naturally decisive person; however, the anxiety I’m feeling over making the “right” decisions or providing him the “right” things has been difficult to cope with.…
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