I signed up for the Storygarden Summit on a whim. I’d enjoyed Plottr’s writing craft book club on Story Genius so much I wanted to keep inside the writing sphere. I’m so glad I signed up! I haven’t worked on my novels or books for over a year. Too many other things going on, and…
Tag: Writing
Circling Story
Story. Stories. Storytelling. Beats the heart of the novel. I’d never thought of how it’s the story not the writing that makes a novel a novel until I began reading on Thursday night Story Genius by Lisa Cron when I was two-thirds of the way through Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir A Circle of Quiet. A week…
Psychology Today Post for January: Anniversary View of Fictional Brain Injury
Personal Perspective: Recovery is more than restoring neurons. Pre-existing insults to the brain and social support matter too. Intelligence Alone Doesn’t Mean You’ll Question Out-of-Date Knowledge A doctor once told me I’m doing better than 90 percent of those with brain injury. Even so, after 24 years, I’ve still not fully recovered. Sarah [in the…
How Not to Format a Narrative with Study Guide
A 20th anniversary edition should be a beautifully and accessibly designed integration of the original two books. Not a slapped together one!
Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts — A Review
I believe I first heard about Prolifiko, Bec Evans and Chris Smith’s company, on Twitter. I’ve been through a couple of incarnations of their methods to help writers write. When I first heard a few years ago about their free 7-day Writing Sprints, which ran the first week of the month, I signed up and…
I Launched Mind Explorer, A Substack Newsletter
Substack is where all the cool writers hang these days. But I’d resisted joining until Twitter started imploding, and I decided to find a way to get a Blue Sky invite quicker. I also thought maybe I could use Substack to make this website’s newsletter easier to manage. Nope. But it did give me a…
Life Before the Internet
Do you remember life before the internet? I do remember life before the internet, but I was an early adopter, so that was a loooong time ago. I used my father’s University of Toronto email account to email an American friend until torfree.net came on the scene. Then someone, I forget who, got in touch…
Improving My Community Through Fiction
How would you improve your community? Back in the 20-teens, the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission — Toronto’s public transit system) was enraging me so much, I wrote a satire, starring a naïve TTC fan who landed a job there, much to her delight! I set up a Twitter account for her and everything. I wrote…
You Would Not Want My Morning Ritual
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like? Oh wow. Talk about a question getting into the heart of life with brain injury, one that didn’t receive neuron-healing treatments for years and then only experimentally at first then one at a time over decades. And one with very…