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. …

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…