Wherever you are on your book writing adventure, you’ll find what you need here…
What to do if you’re just starting out on your Author Adventure: planning, preparation, and dealing with your Inner Dickhead
Wondering how you can use AI tools to help you write, without selling out?
You’re in the right place, my friend.
Because, although I do rail (rightly) against overuse of AI and the very real issues it’s creating, it can also be a terribly useful tool.
I’m gonna need you to stop reading books now. WAIT — hear me out. Reading is one of the best things in the entire multiverse. You should read. Widely and deeply and like a writer. Read books about how to write, by all means. I’ve written several of them myself. I love Steven Pressfield’s War of Art, it’s great; as is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and Stephen King’s On Writing and any other of the great and famous books written by writers on how to write.
13 ways you know you’re a writer: You’ve been staring out of the window for an hour now and all you’ve done is doodle a flower with a horrifying face. You’re supposed to be writing but instead you’re grouting the bathroom tiles. You’ve written the same word 43 times then scratched it out and written FUCK instead.
It’s been an exciting week here at Casa Moxie. I’ve had a LOT of conversations (way more than usual) so I’ll be spending much of this weekend hiding in a darkened room with my headphones on. But the conversations have been so good. I’ve met some wonderful people.
If you want to write a book and you’re not doing it, your problem isn’t that you don’t have time. It’s not that you need more info. And you definitely don’t need another £49 “how to write a bestseller in a week” template. Your problem is that you are not permitted to be bored.
Me: why do I have a headache again? Also me: stares at sleep app showing a sleep debt of 4,184 hours.(I exaggerate but honestly only slightly.) Ah. That might be why my head hurts. And why I can see tweety birds in my peripheral vision. How can my sleep debt be this high?
I love the phrase “aggressively unhelpful”—it’s very diplomatic. Coined by Katy Weber, who interviewed me for her Women & ADHD podcast.
There are some people who do not have a fear response. In the face of danger, they laugh and run towards it (literally).
One of the causes is an unusual genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which destroys the amygdala in the brain, and with it the ability to feel afraid.
None of us has any control over a global pandemic or other people’s behaviour or thoughts or actions. I don’t think we’ve ever lived through a time of such uncertainty. And yet I was trying to control it anyway. Perhaps you were, too. That’s what humans do; we try to control stuff.
Which is, quite simply, exhausting.
Last week, there was a row on my Facebook timeline.
Well, not so much a row, as a demonstration of white male privilege at its worst.
In the face of dozens of women sharing stories and actual facts and stats about discrimination and how unfriendly the world of engineering is to non-males and the ways in which the patriarchy damages all of us (not just women), one man explained to us how we're wrong.
Be grateful for what you can do.
Your body and mind (which are inextricably linked) are incredible. What you can do with them is wondrous.
Tight jumpers (I remember having a meltdown as a child because my mum made me wear a blouse with puffy sleeves, then put a tight cardigan on over the top. Got the panicky sweats just thinking about it now).
Woolly hats.
Woolly scarves.
Woolly gloves.
Wool on my bare skin (shudder).
Felt. UGH FELT.
Anything that feels tight under my arms.
