Treat your writing like a fine sportscar and lovingly detail it before driving off — I was cleaning out filing drawers filled with clippings of my work over the years. I started reading some of them but quickly stopped. Much of my earliest work was, well, awful putting it nicely. Ok, maybe not awful, but the work definitely did not measure up to the caliber…

I bet I’m not alone — For 3 straight days, I’ve been suffering through writing a 50+ page response to an important proposal, and it’s a bitch. Various checklists and documents must be completed, but they’re not fillable PDFs, so they have to be converted, which skewed the formatting — badly. …

The answer is the key to being read — Readers are attracted to an article by the title and the subtitle. Magazine covers are excellent examples. A writing teacher assigned us to study magazine covers in checkout lines at supermarkets and write a paper, analyzing what we learned. Cover blurbs are designed to get people to pick up the…

Is finding joy in the face of worry like looking for a single drop of rain in a rainstorm? — My sister loved the rain, loved letting it beat on her face. She would just stand in it, face upraised, arms open wide, and smiling and laughing in sheer joy. I never understood it. I hate the rain. …

One minute we’re capable, competent adults, and the next, we’re cowering children — I grew up in a constant state of terror. Many of us have. The only place I felt safe was in school, and the one thing that has always made me feel safe is planning. …

What happens when you close the distance between you and your readers — “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.” Carl Sagan I’m a diehard introvert who found Covid isolation freeing. So, sharing my life and personal stories is challenging even with my closest friends. I’m a private person who…