You have spent most of your life being a good person, and that is nice.  Me too.  I used to be (ahem) clergy, so I know what it means to be impressively good (at least, as far as anyone else knows).

Every writer fights her internal editor.  My internal editor is Sybil.  He has at least 57 distinct personalities, all of them very upright and well-dressed.  Many of them suffer from male pattern baldness, but that is beside the point.  My IE takes on the look and attitude of real people I know and says to me: “If you write that what will these other upstanding citizens in your head think of you?  They’ll probably think you’re dirty or some sort of scoundrel.  Write something pretty.”

Am I alone here?

I wrote myself a note in the fancy-fancy notebook as a warm-up exercise.  It is to me, but I’ll share it with those of you who are denizens of decency by day and writers by night:

“Within the first book of the bible there is murder, incest, rape, polygamy, drunken debauchery, war, oppression, sodomy, racism, greed, arrogance, and piles of men who are described as having “known his wife.”

There are enough Christian books about some beautiful Amish prude, whose husband is tender, sexless and hard-working, whose beard feels bristly across her makeupless-face.  There are enough Christian paintings of churches in dark vales lit with an interior incandescent bulb providing light for the rest of nature, which must include a deer who is panteth-ing for water.

God is not in the business of redeeming the ideal.  Redeem a rape, something horrible.  Maybe it’s as simple as living to tell about it.  That is a God universally believable.  All of this other perfectionism is an expression of the wild religious ego; a false, impenitent self, hiding behind knit-together fig leaves.  In your work, give God a moment where he must forsake Christ on the cross because of the sin of your characters, otherwise you are not an artist, and probably not a Christian.

Don’t write a Christian story.  Write a good story instead.”

In the dreamy moments where does your mind wander?  There is a choice.  Do you prefer to go back to a better time, or do you dare attempt to fashion the unknown future?

Faith used to describe those who dared to imagine a heaven-inspired future.  In an ironic culture, faith has become a synonym for fear.

Faith perspective

The world was created good, then derailed.  There was a moment of bliss, followed by endless generations of inherited blight.  We want the bliss, but the blight is between our teeth.

Moving forward is painful and filled with trepidation.  But do not be deceived: there is no going back. 

unaccomplished writer.  unsolicited advice.

Step 2: Realize: the pen has never been mightier.

Last week the e-book overtook the real book in sales at Amazon.com.  Slightly more people chose to read books from a Kindle, an iPad, their phones or a computer screen than from a traditional page.  Before the rise of the e-book, the publishing world was already unraveling.  You made it happen.  You, with the small blog; it’s your fault.

We destroyed the long-standing rules of publication simply by pressing the publish button in our efforts to gain online readers.  People found value in your free work and in the connection with other people that your blog offered.

Consider the time your readers spent reading your last thousand-word post.  Time-on-site is a valuable metric.  As a writer, it is the one I pay closest attention.  Three and a half minutes to read the post; that’s three and a half minutes they will not spend reading better, more established, traditionally published authors. 

Step 1: Decide to be a writer (or an artist) with a blog.

Part two (Part one here) of a week-long series: How to Grow a Medium-Sized Blog for Writers and Creatives.

I used to blog about religion.

The Bible is a long, long book.  Chapter 19, shortly after “In the beginning,” there is a story about two sisters who get their father pass-out drunk so they can have sex with him in order to bear children.  Chapter 19.  Their father is technically one of the good guys.  It is in the Bible.

There are other long Christian books.  None that I’ve read involve incestuous drunkenness.  Books about the Book are dull and safe.  Three years ago I read a book by a well-known pastor; I suspected some confessions.  The word “confessions” was in the title.

He wrote about how he didn’t like some people.  His job was hard.  He cared about his image.  I mean, he did everything but make an actual confession.  I read the whole book because I hoped he’d confess something so that I could forgive him.  Whenever he came close to admitting a flaw, he patched it up for me.  In essence he said, “Here’s how I became better; and you can too!”  So I hate that guy now (forgive me, please), but he sold enough copies to warrant more non-confessional-type books about how to be awesomer.

The book made me want to confess things.  Things I didn’t even do.  So many people write books about being great.  Becoming better.

writing and living well.

Since I am a writer, I do not fall in love with principles.  Most often principles are hat-stands designed for people who wear hats to cover bald spots.  Sometimes they are true.  In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon Affiliate Link), Malcom Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours of practice as if these hours were some sort of principle.  Immediately I want to dismiss him, until he stops writing about Bill Gates and starts to include composers; then I must listen.

I write Ream of Paper with about 7,000 hours of practice under my belt, not enough to be great by Gladwell’s or any other set of standards.  But I practice.  Think about, and I mean give it a quick guesstimate, not the whole of your afternoon, how many hours you have spent writing.  How many hours have you practiced?

My first crack at writing a novel, I chalk up to pure diligence.  Your collection of poetry that no one will buy is not a loss; it is a reminder of 1,500 hours

I think the day after God made the sun, the third day, he woke up to it’s wooing the following morning and began forming the fish and the birds, resigning, “Back to the ol’ grind.”  It must have been a rough day, the fourth.  Fish, for all of their intricacies, look mostly like fish; and birds resemble other birds with slight variations.  I have this vivid onomatopoeia relationship with God, where I make him speak,

Pitfalls of Vision and Nostalgia

Everybody has goals.  They vary in size and scope, but we all have them.  Goals are inescapable.  From the illustrious quest for middle management or some authoritative leadership to small business success to out-drinking your buddy on a Friday night: a goal is a goal.  To achieve a goal requires vision;