Writing LifeTag

My Top Ten Tips for Making a Living as a Writer

Writing is a lousy way to make a living, but a great way to make a life, I said when I started this residency. I’ve been doing both for thirty years. So here are 10 points that I’ve learned about ...

How Writing a Grant App Can Make You a New Person

This month I broke down while revisiting the statement for my Research and Creation grant app with the Canada Council for the Arts. I cried because I saw – for what felt like the first time in a while ...

I Wrote 100,000 Words in a Month: Or When Productivity is Really Crip Grief

(This is not a ‘How To’ article. This is also not an inspiring story about a disabled person doing an extraordinary thing. There is nothing extraordinary here. There is only a dispatch from a place ...

When old ways, thoughts, beliefs, and people no longer serve you

“Every moment is a fresh beginning.” —T.S. EliotLately I have been thinking about the act of releasing the things in my life that no longer serve me. When I revise a piece of writing, the first ...

Writing Beyond the End of the World

We spend our days scrolling through countless words. Many of us are fixated on screens from the moment we awake until the moment we return to the same bed to sleep. And from day to day, not a whole lot ...

How to Engage Online

Online engagement is a reality of the modern writer’s life. It’s rare now for an author to create a story in solitude, and then remain there once their book is out in the world. Digital media now ...

On Querying into an Apocalypse

"I feel so cooped up in my house with this smoke and the moths that keep flying by my window. Is a weekend really a weekend in 2020 if it doesn't include plague, pestilence, and Hell fire?" - @a_h_reaumeI ...

How writing rituals saved me from quitting as a writer

I define my writing ritual as a series of unique actions taken that tells my brain it’s writing and creation time. This is part preparation, part boundary-setting, part protective aura. I know that ...

How To Become That Kind of Bitch (or, One-Night Stands and New Selves)

Before the pandemic, I had a one-night stand with a person I met at a rave, Tyler. The morning after we slept together, I was buttering my toast and he began to ask probing questions about my life and ...

What Do You Do When Your Disability Keeps You from Writing? What I Learned When I Launched a Brute Force Hack on my Brain

What Do You Do When Your Disability Keeps You from Writing? What I Learned When I Launched a Brute Force Hack on my Brain [1]A few years ago, I started hiking alone. I enjoyed escaping the city to one ...