Travel Tales: Baguettes and Berets
Rain poured in sheets as I put the last few items in my suitcase. Ella, my 2-year-old furbaby, stared at me with those beautiful amber eyes. I could see the sadness. I tried to hide my packing from her, but to no avail. My husband and I drove our two dogs, their crates, food, toys,…
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Striking the Balance: Show vs. Tell in Effective Storytelling
The art of storytelling is a delicate dance between showing readers what’s happening and telling them. It’s a balance that writers must master to engage and captivate their audience while conveying essential information and emotions. The age-old debate in the writing community revolves around these two techniques: showing and telling. In this article, I will…
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My Process of Starting a New Book
How does one start a new book? Do writers just sit down and start writing? I was asked to share my process on starting a new book. This is rather loaded because there are so many components to this. Whenever I’d get an idea in my head, I used to just start writing scenes –…
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The Debate on Book Banning: Preserving Freedom or Restricting Knowledge?
You’ve walked into countless bookstores and have seen the displays for banned books. My favorite is the “Don’t read me” section at Barnes & Noble. While book banning isn’t a new phenomenon, it seems to be just as popular nowadays. As someone who started reading at a very young age, I read everything from classics…
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A Year in Review
What a year. It started out in January–in the blustering cold of the Smoky Mountains with my fiancĂ© and friends–where we celebrated my 40th birthday and I got engaged. In March, I met some of my best friends from the Jimmy Eat World group–and even met Jim Adkins in person! For the first time in…
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Tori Amos: A Muse
How music helps me write!
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Poetry in the Air
Writing…rejections…submissions
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Ode to Jimmy Eat World
Hello! I know what you’re thinking – two posts from me in one week? Who is this girl? Trying to make more of an effort in this blog. 🙂 I came across this video of Jimmy Eat World, and hearing them discuss topics such as anxiety, depression, and drinking is another reason why I love…
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Learning to Trust
Hello! It’s been such a long time since I’ve written a blog post, and I need to keep up with them more. I should have been blogging more, especially to chronicle my time in grad school. I have had such a great time learning and challenging myself to try new things and to improve my…
