Blog
WRITING
My therapist said Candace was a gift. I asked for Prozac.
“Jealousy,” according to writer Anne Lamott, “ is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to...
How to save $27 and lose $200k
I'm at a stage in life and in business that requires me to kill some old habits. Oh, being frugal and learning to do it all on my own has gotten me here, but it won't get me where I want to go. I know that. Maybe you do too. Which is where this story comes in.
Your sad story is boring and it’s not your fault
Somewhere around chapter four of a manuscript I read last month, I hit a personal story and slid right off it. I'm telling you, it was pure Teflon! Nothing was wrong with the story, per se. The sentences were clean, grammatically correct, which, trust me, is a plus....
The word that makes me want to set a manuscript on fire
The other day I got on a call with a coach I've known for years. Smart woman. Built a real business, wrote a real book once, the hard way, the way that takes eighteen months and costs you a little piece of your soul. This time she'd written a new one in a week and a...
READING
Eight Books, Eight Lessons: Why I’m Not Slowing Down
At my 60th birthday party a couple of years back, something interesting happened. A number of my friends started talking about retirement—counting down the days, making plans to "slow down," fantasizing about endless yoga retreats in Mexico and Netflix binges. They...
The Best Books of 2025: Holiday Reading Recommendations from Summit Press Authors
Every year around the holidays, I love pulling together book recommendations—and this year, I thought: who better to ask than published authors? After all, writers tend to be voracious readers who know their stuff. I asked some of our Summit Press authors to share...
Gordo lied
"This is the hardest thing you will ever do." That's what Gordo, the instructor of our Intro to Scuba Diving class, told us while he scrawled his name on the blackboard. Gordo was a big guy, nearly 300 pounds of flesh that couldn't have been easy to squeeze into a wet...
Why I finally created book templates (After years of hating them)
As a chemistry major who really shouldn't have been a chemistry major for a whole host of reasons, I nearly lost my mind with physical chemistry. One exercise that I found particularly punishing was proving "proofs" for quantum theorems. I mean, how was I supposed to...
LIFE
My mother has no idea what’s wrong with her (and she’s fine with that)
On Saturday I called my mother to check on her. She's getting up there in age, and she'd been flat on her back for a couple of weeks. Zero appetite. Which, if you know my mother, is the part that should worry you. The woman has never met a casserole she couldn't...
The morning we got lost and found out who we were
It was Good Friday, roughly 6:30 in the morning, the kind of cold spring day that makes you question your life choices. Three of us — all marathon running buddies, all colleagues at the same chemical company in the next town over — laced up our shoes in a parking lot...
The half-life of relevance (and why panicking won’t save you)
Walt and I have this conversation probably once a month. Who was that woman — the one who wore purple and taught people to sell from the stage? Where'd she go? We genuinely cannot remember her name. And here's the thing: a few years ago, she was everywhere. Speaking...
I bought a cottage in Ireland. You can write a damn book
Have you put your book dream on the back burner because you can already think of ten reasons it won't work? I was watching a fox and her two kits bound across the field one morning as Walt and I drank our first cup of coffee. In the upper pasture, a herd of dairy cows...
Check out my book
A no-nonsense guide that teaches writers how to strategically build books using a brick-by-brick content system, focusing on practical results over perfectionism.
Subscribe to my newsletter
Want to know my deal? Well, these are some of my stories. This is my take on life, writing, and reading.