judgment – My Life in Paragraphs

Invisible Girl

As women we all play many roles. There are the respectable roles – parent, adult-in-the-room, community member, good neighbor, sibling, maybe even elected official, role model, local celebrity; but then there are the roles we dream of playing – famous novelist, perfect mother, instant millionaire, skinny-girl-who-can-eat-anything.

In my teens, the role I most wanted to play was beautiful girl.

I’d never admit it publicly amongst my geeky, feminist friends, but what I wanted most was to be the kind of girl whose looks stopped traffic. My aspirations didn’t come to much as I was trapped inside the body of a pudgy, Continue reading “Invisible Girl”

Writer or Brain Surgeon – YOU decide

Most of us writers are professional whiners. We know how to complain with colorful, compelling alliteration and perfect grammar.

And, truly, we have so much to complain about—low pay, minimal recognition for ridiculous amounts of work, a swamped market, the Big 5 monopoly that rigs the system and controls the best-seller lists. And then there’s the social media grind, endless platform building, the odds, the hours of harvesting the dregs of your heart, only to be dismissed because that genre’s not selling. Thankless work, really.

And whose skin doesn’t crawl when they hear the phrase, “Anybody can get published nowadays.” I read a well-written complaint recently wherein a professional writer said something to the effect of – Continue reading “Writer or Brain Surgeon – YOU decide”

Anybody Can Write a Book, Right?

It used to be that if you wrote a story and it appeared in book form, then you were published.

Okay, maybe it still is like that, except now there are qualifiers. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question is how were you published?

It feels a bit like the battles I stepped into after my second child was born when I stopped working full-time and stayed home to raise children. The working mothers vs the stay-at-home moms. The assumptions flew both ways and were equally unfair and at times, ridiculous. We were all still doing the hard work of being mothers.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about traditional publishing and self-publishing. Continue reading “Anybody Can Write a Book, Right?”