“How are you?” “Busy.” I’m so busy. Three powerful, tiny words. Three destructive words. Three words that burned me out, that hurt my mental health, …
Why I Stopped Glorifying Being Busy & Burned Out
Waking Up Early to Write
Or, how I joined the 5 a.m. Writers’ Club and stuck with it. Since mid-April 2021, I’ve been waking up earlier than usual to write. …
Non-writing activities to help your story when you’re struggling to write
Note: This post is geared toward novelists, but there’s advice in here that can be applicable for other types of writers, too! Writing is hard. …
Making Time to Write with a Full-Time Job
Writing, as many writers will agree, is a lot like breathing. I can’t imagine a life where I’m not writing regularly. Yet like many writers, …
Recovering from the Dissertation and Learning to Like Research Again
After I defended my dissertation and received my PhD, I made a promise to myself: I was going to take a break from history. A …
What NaNoWriMo Taught Me About Writing
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which takes place every November, might seem like a crazy endeavor: write 50,000 words–a short rough draft of a novel–in …
A Healthy Sick Day? Or, How A Cold Helped Me Sort Out My Priorities
Recently I came across this unpublished piece that I wrote several years ago, while I was still living the faster-paced city life, and wanted to …
A Connecticut Yankee in the Blue Ridge Mountains
I could call this post, “How I worked up the nerve to finally move exactly where I wanted to live.” Another apt title would be, …
Writing After the PhD
Joy. That’s what was missing. I’d gone over draft after draft, completed both major and minor revisions. This is part of any writing process, to …
A Winter Night in Warsaw
This is something a little different from my usual style and content. I originally wrote this for a more literary-style context and not as a …