writing
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Best Things Today Examples
I wanted to give some examples of what my daily writing practice is like. At the end of each day I sit down and write about the three best things of that particular day. This is something I started way back in 2017 (what feels like one hundred years ago) when looking for a clean slate for a new year. It’s evolved into my single best mental health support strategy, keeping me grounded and focused on the things that matter. Surprisingly, the things that matter are often very small things – focusing on the really good cup of coffee, a silly thing a squirrel is doing, the way the air…
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My Substack Newsletter
Hello friends, my long term project, loosely called Finding Joy in the Middle aka “My Best Things List” is available on Substack as a newsletter. I’ll share some specific posts to give you a taste for what kinds of writing I do there. Meanwhile, I invite you to join the list, which is free (but you can choose to pay with a subscription, which is always appreciated and helps fund my wild search for joy and other writing and artistic pursuits.) What you get with my newsletter is a daily email with my “list” for the day (generally I write these at the very end of my day in the…
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Interview with Andy Weir, author of The Martian now up on The Maker Mom
When you fangirl in public, sometimes others hear! My friend Kim Moldofsky of TheMakerMom.com knew I was a big fan of the book The Martian and offered me the opportunity to interview author Andy Weir for her site. I was thrilled with the chance, and after some mayhem and mishaps of scheduling (which I’ll tell you about sometime) I was able to talk with Andy for a while and get his perspective on science fiction writing, STEM careers and fields, growing up a nerd in the 70s (spoiler: Andy Weir and I are exactly the same age and our parents were equally geeky. We had fun trading notes about our…
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CONVERGENCE – by Karen T. Smith, a YA Sci-Fi novel
Desperate for something new to read? My young adult (young end of YA, perfectly appropriate for most middle-grade readers) science fiction novel CONVERGENCE by Karen T. Smith is now available on all ebook platforms (amazon kindle, barnes and noble nook, smashwords for most other e-readers. Note: Kobo and Sony Reader distribution should be within the next 1-2 weeks. Apple mail trail a bit longer.) Paperback available at most e-retailers and Createspace.com. First of all, isn’t the cover gorgeous? I had a fantastic cover model (one of the kids’ babysitters!) and my really awesome friend Renee of The Cover Counts worked on this cover with me. We found some fantastic images,…
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E-book Formatting Checklist
How to Format your e-book for independent publishing In formatting ebooks for independent publishing, I’ve found that the detailed information offered in the Smashwords style guide, while top-notch and something that EVERY indie publisher needs to read, is a bit hard to parse when you’re going through the routine of formatting another book/story for publication, so I (with the help of my 9 year old son) documented the process in a simple(r) checklist, so I could be sure I was following the correct steps as I went. This is heavily based on that Smashwords style guide, so you really need to read that if you want to publish your own…
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Writing with my kids
So I’ve been doing a lot of non-writing lately. Or, more accurately, writing for purposes other than other’s enjoyment, as that’s the only way I can think of accurately describing a Needs Assessment document or a Benefit Communication Piece. I mean, I’m sure the people reading the needs assessments and benefit communications feel very…entertained in some way or another, but those venues are not typically accessing the creative part of my brain, thus I don’t think of them as “writing” exactly. Think this will be them at their own book signing in a few years? So I’ve been missing writing, and thus I’ve been thinking to myself that I need…
