"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."  ~Mark Twain, attributed We place a lot of emphasis on literacy, and rightly so! But this quotation made me think of how many people read only for functional reasons (work reports, sports scores, etc.) but who […]

  "Flying helicopters has been referred to as the art of falling without hitting the ground–and the same might be said of the ride to publication. It’s the art of hanging in during the free fall, keeping your eye on the horizon, and refusing to give up. No matter what."–Robert B. Robeson (in the Jul/Aug […]

  "Realize that publishing isn’t art, it’s bart. That’s business and art. Being true to oneself also requires being true to what publishing requires today. A writer needs to realize he can’t just sit home and write. He must market, promote, blog, Twitter, travel, call, cajole, shake hands, interpretive dance, whatever it takes to build […]

  "Be curious: Who is that woman buying five lemons and two peaches at the grocery counter? What does her purse contain? And what does she dream at night? Only you, the writer, care. Don’t let her disappear out in the parking lot and into oblivion." –Natalie Goldberg (Writer’s Digest article…Sep 2010)I love this quotation…especially […]

 Does anyone else feel this way, too? "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver […]

  "We should approach the page as a dog approaches an open car window. We have to stick our heads out, let our ears flap and watch for bugs in our eyes. We have to be in and of the moment. We have to let our hearts fly." –N.M. Kelby A dog with its head […]

  To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) I’m struggling to be happy lately. I do think happiness […]

  "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."–Andre Gide This is one of my favorite quotations, because I need to remind myself of this frequently with regard to my writing. In my life, I’m up for adventure and change and challenge. But in my writing, I find […]

  I’m under a lot of deadline stress lately, so I thought I’d post a quotation that actually looked at the positive side of stress. Here it is: That’s right. There isn’t one. I couldn’t find a single quotation extolling the virtues of stress. Dang. But I did find this about deadlines: A deadline is […]