Blog Posts
Exclusive: Sharon Shinn’s Time Management Tips!
By Hillary Rettig |
I was recently thrilled to have the opportunity to interview bestselling fantasy / science fiction / romance / young adult novelist Sharon Shinn. Why all the genres? She's incredibly prolific. Moreover, she's prolific while holding down a full-time job. A writing job! It's just incredible. I just had to find out how ...
Cleveland Events: Saturday 4/23 and Sunday 4/24
By Hillary Rettig |
Saturday, April 23, 10:00 a.m. to Noon in Cleveland, Ohio at Literary Cleveland at Lake Erie Ink, Hillary is presenting Joyful Writing Productivity. Inspiration exists and is available to everyone at any time. Under-productivity, procrastination, and blocks are solvable problems. The secret to achieving a state of near-perpetual inspiration (a.k.a., ...
Harper Lee, “Second Novel Syndrome,” and Situational Perfectionism
By Hillary Rettig |
Harper Lee, author of the immortal To Kill a Mockingbird, died last week at 89. She never published another book except for Go Set a Watchman, which was published in 2015 in what many consider to be dubious circumstances. Lee may have suffered from second-novel syndrome, a form of procrastination ...
Why We’re Such Poor Appreciators of Our Own Work
By Hillary Rettig |
Here is a delightful two-minute film from Derek Sivers which discusses why we often fail to fully appreciate our own work. It also explains why it's a bad idea to compare your work with that of a famous person. Comparisons are perfectionist, but comparing yourself to someone famous is especially ...
“If You’ve Made Them Cry, You’ve Succeeded In Getting Your Point Across.”
By Hillary Rettig |
A Success Academy charter school teacher was caught on film harshly criticizing and publicly humiliating a first grader. She literally tore the girl's classwork into pieces and flung them aside! Lowood School, from Jane Eyre The school is claiming that the incident was an exception, both for this teacher and ...
If We Could Turn Back Time: Cher Models Nonperfectionism!
By Hillary Rettig |
I've always loved Cher's tweets: they're so playful and sincere, even when she's making a sharp political point, which she does often. So naturally, I loved this New York Times piece about her Twitter style: She pays little to no attention to rules of grammar, like punctuation or sentence structure, ...
Why “Positive Procrastination” is (Mostly) a Scam
By Hillary Rettig |
Every week, it seems, someone publishes an article about how procrastination can be good for you. This week it's The New York Times. I am all about using whatever productivity techniques work for you. But in my experience pro-procrastination techniques work for very few people, and are actually more likely ...
How John Scalzi Meets His Deadlines
By Hillary Rettig |
This week, bestselling author John Scalzi blogged about how he's going to meet his 2016 deadlines: "For me, the major problem is not writer’s block or plot issues or anything structural involving the novel; I generally don’t have problems with those once I start, and with this new novel, thankfully, ...
