Personal Development with Gray Miller
There’s a dream of being an author that goes something like this: After long coffee-fueled hours toiling alone at a shadowed desk lit by a single bulb the writer emerges triumphant, a 50,000 word manuscript clutched in hand! Bumping into the agent waiting eagerly outside the door, the sheaf of papers is exchanged for a …
It’s a trite saying, but there’s some truth to it: before you can love someone else, you have to love yourself. There’s a lot behind that, involving self-care and not burning yourself out and not distracting yourself from your own problems by focusing on others – but at the core, it’s about skill. If you can’t feel …
Yesterday while doing some studying with Middle Daughter I was trying to adjust some electronics into what I had hoped would be my Road Warrior Writer’s kit. It consisted of an Anker portable battery which was charging my iPhone 6+ (in a very low-tech stand hack) via the Nomad ChargeCard while I typed using Daedalus …
The Numbers Game, part 1 Any technique will work, so long as you relentlessly work it. It’s a numbers game. That is, success is a pure function of the law of large numbers. – Nick Murray The Universe likes to play with synchronicity. Ok, not really, but our brains like to pretend it does, and …
Getting Out of Your Groove Recently one of my favorite authors, John Scalzi, wrote a column in the TOR newsletter about how he challenged himself with his latest book, Lock In. It wasn’t a huge challenge, on the surface: he simply did not allow himself to use semi-colons. For most non-writers and perhaps even most writers, this …
This is not original. Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go: this is replicative content. I read a nifty blog article about “How the Internet, Dopamine, and Your Brain are Working Together to Screw Your Potential“, and it inspired the content in this post. But that’s ok. There Are Two Kinds of Creation… Well, ok, actually …
Always Be (INSERT PASSION HERE) Recently a very talented illustrator friend of mine posted on his Facebook page that he had gotten a client based on an offhand sketch he’d made on the back of a napkin in a restaurant. He declared that the lesson learned was “ABD: Always Be Drawing.” I ran into the same …
Be careful what you wish for… It’s not irony, exactly, but it’s that thing that people often call irony. A couple of weeks ago I decided I wanted to get involved in the Ignite Madison that happens on May 21. I have to run a similar event in July, and I thought it would be good …
Scene: A Dark Parking Lot in the South of Madison “Why are you giving me a ride this morning?” my partner asked me at 5am as we walked toward the car in the pre-dawn darkness. “Because I’ve had finish next chapter on my to-do list for the last three days, and it keeps getting put off,” …
The Writer’s Life for Me! Recently I set a goal for myself. It was a fairly arbitrary goal: I wanted to get seven different pieces accepted for publication in one month. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds; I’ve had individual pieces accepted fairly regularly, and this was just upping the ante by focusing my …