Tag: Writing

What Football and Marriage Taught Me About Writing

Jets QB Mark Sanchez, photo courtesy of FoxSports.com.

Recently, I had a chance to scarf up a couple of pretty decent tickets to an NFL game. (American football, yes, I know, stop laughing, you silly round-ball kickers.) The New York Jets were playing the New England Patriots. I am a casual watcher of both teams, mainly when they’re winning, but my husband has been a die-hard Jets fan for most of his life.

Granted, the game was on Thanksgiving and I’d already made plans with my family, but as my office mate took a pass on the opportunity then subsequently offered it to me, this stream of thoughts flowed through my head: Continue reading “What Football and Marriage Taught Me About Writing”

Support Group for a Writer

Welcome to The Learning Curve. This is where I chronicle my adventures as a new writer. The goal is to inspire you to put that bag of chips down, step away from the television, and tell the world a good story.

Support Group for a Writer

Writing, for the most part, is a lonely job. There are very few of us who can afford to write full time without relying on some other form of income to keep the creditors at bay. Take our Indies Unlimited crew for example. Stephen Hise sells apples and homemade furniture by the side of the road. K.S. ‘Kat’ Brooks has a mobile dog washing service. Laurie Boris trains dolphins for a living, while Chris James, T.D. McKinnon, Carolyn Steele, and Yvonne Hertzberger all perform in a traveling circus to pay the bills. We do what we need to do in order to do what we want to do, which is write.

Continue reading “Support Group for a Writer”

“I’ve been resting for this testing, digesting every word the Ancients say…”

That title is from a really, really old Genesis song (Counting Out Time, 1974), and it came to mind only because of the word “digesting.” Because really, if you’re not going to engage in some Black Friday madness, how better to spend the day after Thanksgiving than by letting your innards assimilate those pounds of poultry you consumed yesterday, while you lie around the house? In other words, I’m going to guess not an awful lot of people are going to read this column today, unless you just happen to be feeling too bloated to head down to Best Buy to watch some Mortal Consumer Kombat. 😉 Continue reading ““I’ve been resting for this testing, digesting every word the Ancients say…””

Redux: No More Professional Writers?

[Contributing author Yvonne Hertzberger is away either modeling lingerie or making linguini—I’m a little unclear on the details, the phone connection is a little iffy up here in the mountain enclave. Anyway, enjoy this encore performance of an article that rings ominously as true today. – Hise]

On July 26 the Globe and Mail, Canada’s most respected newspaper, devoted two-thirds of the front page and half of the second page of their Globe Arts section to the article. ‘There will be no more professional writers in the future’ (their punctuation) Naturally, I was most interested. It came on the heels of a similar article in the Guardian. Other rags posted on the same topic. I got the impression they all timed their diatribes together for greatest impact. The purpose, as I see it – war on self-publishing and a (futile) reactionary attempt to save the old guard. Continue reading “Redux: No More Professional Writers?”