Office Surfing and Writing Breaks
During long stretches of writing, I usually write in fifty-minute blocks with ten-minute breaks. And what do I do in those breaks? Lately, I have been going to my balance board for five of those precious ten minutes. I am not sure it helps my creative process, but it...
Writing Time
I am trying to increase my daily writing time. Currently I’m roughly at two hours a day, but in November, I hope to increase it significantly. But what do I mean by writing time? What does it include, and, more importantly, what does it exclude? My writing time...
Am I a Writer or an Author?
Am I a writer? Yes. I have blogged every day for nearly two years just on my blog, and on other healthcare domains, I have written over 500 blog posts. But am I an author? The answer to this question is less clear, but I am asking it for two reasons. First, how should...
Hyphens: Am I a “Physician Writer” or a “Physician-Writer?”
To hyphenate or not to hyphenate, that is the question. I am a physician who writes, and a writer who is a physician. My question: Am I a physician writer or a physician-writer? First I tried Google. No help there. “Physician Writer” gave me 53,200 hits,...
How I Became a Sloppy Blogger
My blogging has become sloppy lately—filled with grammatical errors and poor sentence structure. Why? Because "to save time," I stopped doing my one final check: printing out my blog post in the WordPress Preview step, and physically going through a hard copy with a...
A “Twitter Rabbit Hole” Near Miss
I nearly got dragged into an Twitter argument ((Twurgument?) about semantics the other day, although saying I was “nearly dragged” is disingenuous: It’s more accurate to say I came very close to voluntarily starting an argument. The interesting thing? The potential...
My Morning Person Dilemma
I am a morning person—a 5 A.M. morning person. I am also an Eat That Frog! kind-of-guy. (By this, I mean I believe in Brain Tracy’s advice to always do my most important task first.) My dilemma? I am trying to decide whether to first do a 5 A.M. workout or to first do...
Paraphrasing James Patterson
I just watched James Patterson’s Masterclass on creative writing . Here is one of the jewels he dropped—paraphrased: Know what you like to do. Learn how to do it well. Do more of it. Now that I am writing full time, I get it.
Creative Energy’s Law of Amplification?
Right now, most of my creative energy is focused on writing—especially in the fiction arena—but this week I have also started a course on one of my creative hobbies: black and white photography. Here’s an odd thing. Despite having committed to completing two of my...
Words are Like a Potter’s Clay
In the recent Write Now with Scrivener podcast episode Rashelle Isip, Professional Organizer, Ms. Isip talked about how similar writing is to pottery, how words are like clay, and how essential it is to get this clay on the potter’s wheel as the necessary first step...