Making Meaning of Your Memories

This summer, my two daughters-in-law gave birth to beautiful baby girls. I experienced everything from the thrill of my sons and their new wives announcing that they were expecting, to watching them grow over the course of 40 weeks, and then finally, wondrously, welcoming two perfect girls into the ...

June 30th marked the midyear mark for 2022, the end of the second quarter, and the perfect time to evaluate how you’re doing with your annual writing goals. At the beginning of the year, I took a risk and publicly shared my 2022 writing goal:

By the end of the second quarter of 2022, I will have co...

At the beginning of this year, I set a writing goal for myself: Finish writing the first draft of my memoir by the end of June. It’s a realistic goal if I maintain my writing routine. For me, this means writing first thing when I wake up. I set my Tomato timer on my phone for 30 minutes. Invariably,...

I’m a goal-setter. I can’t help myself. At the end of the year, I like to take time to reflect on the year I’ve just lived. What were the high points, low points, and points in between? How far did I get in achieving the goals I set for the year? For my writing especially, I like to assess how much ...

When I moved to the city to start a new life after my divorce, I splurged and bought myself a special writing desk. It has the look of an old drafting table with a matching swivel stool. Both the desk and the stool can crank up and down depending on what height I want to position myself at or if I w...

My schedule was all set. I had my writing time blocked out for the week—30 minutes first thing every morning. The week started out great. Monday I woke up early and put in an hour-and-a-half of writing, which basically pushed me ahead of my writing schedule for the week. Good thing, because on Wedne...

I love the idea of going away to a cabin in the mountains or a cottage on a lake or a beach house by the ocean to write. But let’s be real—how many of us actually get to do this?

In all the years I’ve been writing, I have only sequestered myself in a cabin to write by myself once. Granted, it was g...

Everyone who embarks on a journey to write their memoir inevitably hits a wall. You have a dream of telling a slice of your life story, but you meet resistance—a too-full calendar, kids who need your full-time attention, a day-job that saps your energy and leaves you too tired to write your tale. We...