Am I letting myself be led by fear or by love? — Are you walking around every day with a musical or a memoir stuck in your head? Not someone else’s, but the one you’ve been writing for oh … the last five to ten years. I recently watched the Netflix original movie “tick, tick … Boom!” with my wife and teenage…

An interview with Cindy Heath — Do you want to heal intergenerational trauma? And end that Mama or Daddy Drama so many have embedded within us for decades? Write a memoir. That’s what Cindy Heath has discovered by writing a memoir for three years and taking a plunge into painful emotions from her past. And learning…

An interview with Stuart Grant — You post a few stories on Medium. Your share them with a friend. He tells you he wants to introduce you to an acquaintance who is looking for someone to be a ghost writer and tell their life story. You meet for breakfast. This man trusts you to be the…

Here’s how much she got paid — I interviewed author Aly Brown about her 15-year journey to land a literary agent and book publisher. Here’s a handy little guide Aly shared with me from Publishers Marketplace to know how much a standard book contract pays: Nice deal $1 — $49,000 Very nice deal $50,000 — $99,000 Good…

An interview with author Aly Brown — Are you looking to find a literary agent? Got an idea for a non-fiction book? Or writing a memoir? A novel? It took Aly ten years to find a literary agent. Another five to sign her first book contract. She felt like giving up but persevered. And we can all…

They say God works in strange ways — We have a family tradition where my wife, teenage son, and I take turns showing each other some of our favorite videos on a laptop. My wife created it after we watched all nine seasons of Little House on The Prairie. We needed something to replace the Ingel’s family. Usually…

What I learned in my recovery — There is an old saying, “you can run but you can’t hide,” that relates to a period of my life when I fell into an addiction. The saying means, you can try to escape what you fear most but ultimately you must face it — and what I feared most…

A shout-out to an interview with Andy Spears — One of the most important things I learned in a recovery program is that addiction and mental health go hand and hand. Especially dealing with underlying emotions triggering an addiction. There is always an underlying emotion and trigger in my addiction and learning to deal with my emotions is the…

It always works for me — Feel like giving up on writing? Depressed? Have trouble writing? Frustrated? It happens to us all. Here’s what I tell myself when I feel this way: “Put your ass where you heart wants to be and plunge in.” — Steve Pressfield It’s that simple. Writing a long-form novel and you’re…