Not long ago, my youngest daughter and I were talking about high school popularity. “But Mom, you weren’t cool in high school, right?” “Oh I was extremely cool,” I said. “It’s just that no one knew it.” See, from my point of view, being popular in high school (for most people) meant giving up part...
Tag: creative
Holiday Inspiration for Your Creative Self
Are you feeling the holi-daze? Finding it hard to keep up during this busy season, and feeling frustrated because your artistic work may be taking a back seat? Me too. So I’m posting this video I created to help writers stay in touch with their creative sides during this stressful (but joyful) time of year....
New Video – An Open Apology to My Creative Self
Enjoy my newest video revisiting one of my most popular posts from this blog, “An Open Apology to My Creative Self.” Feel encouraged again to embrace your creative energy and the joy it brings to your life!
How to Have it All
New Year’s Eve is fast approaching, and the radio ads remind us to enjoy “all things in moderation.” But it’s not just this time of year that we hear that advice. To many people, that phrase sounds restrictive or even punitive. Not to me. It’s my personal motto. Has been for a long time. You...
Why We Love the Classics
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” I found that quote by Italo Calvino on Goodreads the other day, and it struck me that at no other time of the year is that saying more true. The holiday season brings us so many beloved classics in all...
29,000 Words
I’ve written just over 29,000 words on this blog since I started it a year and a half ago. That’s the same number as you’ll find in my Home-Front Heroes children’s books! I’ve written 83 posts, each ranging between 300 and 450 words, in about the same amount of time it takes me to research,...
The Foibles of Self-exploration
“Self-exploration is my favorite hobby,” my new friend said. And I nodded vigorously, glad to have found a kindred spirit. In the past year, though, I’ve been trying to make some life decisions and finding that all of this personal study has left me a bit confused. Is it the Leo in me that makes...
Do You Trust Yourself?
Yesterday I was interviewing Terri Norvell for the radio show I co-host. She’s an expert on inner trust. She made a comment that really stuck with me. She said, “If you can’t trust yourself, you can’t fully trust other people.” And oh, how we need other people if we want to succeed. She went on...
Founding Fathers Speak on Living Creatively
As you know, I’m an historian by training, and the American Revolution has always been one of my favorite eras to study. It continues to fascinate me that great leaps forward (and backward) in our world cultures seem to take place when a particular group of like-minded, ambitious people come together, and never was there...
The Happiness of Art
There are two lines in the book The Artist’s Way that read, “A productive artist is quite often a happy person. This can be very threatening as a self-concept to those who are used to getting their needs met by being unhappy.” Yet we, as a society, continue to hold on to the concept that...