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As a book coach in my early days, I was too nice when my clients told me they didn’t have time for writing. I didn’t want them to feel like failures so I allowed them to feel victorious if they wrote three times a week even for just a few minutes a day. Yes, that’s better than nothing. Those Bursts of Free Time But strive to do better than the minimum. If you’re a writer, writing is your job. You show up for work whether you feel like it or not. You find time for writing every day. As Stephen King said, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Write everyday no matter how much or how little you write […]

I titled my book about how to write a book You’ve Got the Time because “I don’t have time to write” is the #1 excuse I hear from would-be authors for why they can’t write their book. You have time to write your book even in the busiest of weeks. Go with Your Flow If you want to be more productive, become familiar with your body clock. Go with your flow, not against it. Figure out what hours are left after your workday is finished. If you work a day job, your remaining hours are in the early morning, late afternoon-early evening, and late night. Those are your choices. Which work better for you? Your Best Time to Write If you aren’t sure, try them all and see which best […]

My supervisor at a college where I once taught said to me one day as I was freewriting in my journal, “Ah, the life of a writer. Sitting along the bank of a river, leaning against a tree, feeling the breeze in his hair as he writes.” Well, maybe that was his ideal writer’s space. (I was actually sitting at my desk in a cramped office at the time.) It’s not mine. Do you have a writer’s space? Where is that one physical place where you can return to day after day to concentrate on your writing and researching? In these Covid-19 times, that place probably is your home whether you like it or not. But the quarantine will end. Life will resume to some sense of normalcy. Let’s Visualize […]

Last week I introduced you to USB thumb drives and the cloud (“Backing Up Files with a USB Flash Drive and the Cloud”), two important options for backing up your files. This week I’ll be talking about the external hard drive and then offering a few final words. External Hard Drive Pros and Cons External hard drives offer the advantage of local control. Unless someone breaks into your house and steals it, information on your external hard drive can’t be hacked or stolen. In addition, they cost less than ever. After you pay the one-time cost to purchase the device, you’re done. You don’t have recurring subscription and bandwidth-usage fees that are typical with cloud storage. And their transfer speed is faster than the cloud. You can pay more for […]

Last February, my wife Emily and I visited friends, Nick and Wendy, who had recently moved to Mexico. One night we went out to a restaurant for dinner. I left my knapsack on the floor in the backseat of their Jeep hidden under a thick blanket. Nick locked the door. When we returned less than an hour later, the back door was unlocked and my knapsack, with laptop inside, was gone. I never saw it again. Happy Ending to Near Disaster This story has two happy endings: My insurance covered the cost to replace my stolen equipment. My files were backed up. Within a week of our return to Michigan, I had a new knapsack, appointment book, and laptop, and I had retrieved all of my files. A week later, […]