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 Intelligence Alone Doesn’t Mean You’ll Question Out-of-Date Knowledge A doctor once told me I’m doing better than 90 percent of those with brain injury.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…
Tag: Writing
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…
So Many Things…
What’s something most people don’t understand? My post titles’ SEO these days are shit. I’m not following best practices for the Google crawler to find my posts and treat them preferentially in search results. Well, except for my last one — I used “top ten,” which is good for SEO. That’s why you see so…
Top Ten Reasons to Say No
How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals? Saying “no” is trendy in the self-care department. Especially in the for-women area. The axiom goes that women don’t care for themselves, want to please everyone, can’t say “no,” and end up sacrificing themselves and their goals. Kind of like Jesus,…