Write with TLC

Oh, boy!  Am I excited or what!!!  Christina Katz discusses being ethical in The Prosperous Writer this week, and I’ve been giving ethics a lot of thought lately!  You’ve got to love it when that happens! Last week, a friend told me about an ethical dilemma that had arisen at her work.  She was in her own ethical dilemma over how to handle someone else’s unethical behavior. Behavior that impacted her life and her ability to do her job.  She felt it necessary she do something.  She devised a plan.  It didn’t quite work out the way she’d hoped.  It can be hard to handle it when someone else’s lack of ethics appears to get rewarded and your attempt to do the ethical thing about it gets “punished”. I know someone who has been downloading movies that by my definition are “pirated”.  I’ve expressed my discomfort with this explaining that “stealing is stealing” and there’s no splitting hairs.  Just because it’s “interesti...

This week  Christina Katz tackles professionalism in The Prosperous Writer . Most of us would never ask a professional to do their work for free.  Writers are often told they should write for the love of writing and money should be a secondary concern.  How many times are poets encouraged to “give” their poetry to a magazine or journal for the “exposure”?  How often do people ask authors to give them copies of their books as if the work they  put into creating their work is somehow less important than other jobs?  I think this mentality can create doubt in the mind of the most productive artists.  We, as artists, have a tendency to go along with it rather than stand up and say “I worked hard on that.  Is the time, effort, research, and skill I put into creating that product worth less than the work you do each day?”   When I published my novel, All She Ever Wanted , I was bombarded with people wanting free copies. ...

This week Christina Katz discusses commitment in The Prosperous Writer .  She compares a writing career to the commitment necessary for a marriage to work.  I’ve been married 18 years, so I can relate to that quite well. The definition of commitment has changed for me over years.  Commitment is knowing that when you doubt every aspect of the very thing to which you’re most devoted, the feeling will pass.  It’s knowing that on the other side of that doubt lies the love, acceptance, progress, and success that makes doubt irrelevant. One day this week, I had a crisis of self-doubt. It didn’t come from any particular source.  I fought it at first.  Then I ignored it.  Then I explored it to see if there was a lesson I needed to learn.  Then I just accepted it.  As soon as I admitted its existence, it started to dissipate.  That’s when I knew it didn’t have any real source.  By acknowledging it, I was able to bring a ...