writing about writing

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Obsessed

    I am officially obsessed with the writing site 750words.com. Premise: write 3 pages (about 250 words/page) each morning. “Morning pages” some writers call them. So this semi-brilliant guy has written a website where you can do just that (he talks about the details here). Only the best part is, you don’t have to do the pages in the morning. Any time of day will do (phew, us night owls all just breathed a big sigh of relief.) So a friend mentioned this to me a while back and I looked and thought the site looked interesting, but then moved on (as is so often the case.) Yesterday, when mentally beating…