Quote of the day
Not only will standing, pacing, fidgeting, and all the other movements you can do throughout the day keep the grim reaper at bay, you’ll notice pretty quickly that you’ll be more productive, more focused, and healthier.
~KRISTEN HALL-GEISLER, author of You’ll Stand and You’ll Like It: A Short, Functional Guide to Office Ergonomics and the Standing Desk
WRITING & SCREENWRITING
- Should you wait for writing inspiration, or stick to a routine?, The Write Life | Tweet
Do you wait for inspiration to strike before you write, or sit down on a regular basis and write regardless of how you feel?
→The Five-Minute Writer: Exercise and inspiration in creative writing in five minutes a day
- Using hyphens to avoid confusion, Live Thrive Write | Tweet
f I called you a short story editor, would I be remarking on your height? I would be, if I didn’t hyphenate the phrase “short story editor.” To avoid misunderstanding, I would write “short-story” to make clear what the short is modifying.
→How to Use Hyphens: Twenty-one Rules for Hyphenation
- How to use an ellipsis…correctly, The Write Practice | Tweet
Liz here. Here at the Write Practice, we have love for all punctuation marks: commas, semicolons, question marks. Today we’re discussing that trio of periods that make up the ellipsis. What’s an ellipsis?
→Mastering the Craft of Writing: How to Write With Clarity, Emphasis, and Style
- Five character development mistakes, My Bookish Life | Tweet
Character development mistakes are commonplace. The road to completing a novel is fraught with many traps, and creating a weak character is one of them. Beside an unconvincing plot, it’s one of the elements readers complain about most often in their reviews.
→Creating Characters: The Complete Guide to Populating Your Fiction
- Narrative Structure–Building a better drama, Script mag | Tweet
One of the most common problems I encounter in the spec scripts I read is the failure of the screenwriter to craft a proper dramatic narrative.
→Writing & Selling Drama Screenplays (Writing & Selling Screenplays)
SELF-PUBLISHING
- Want to sell more books? 23 Pinterest Tips every author needs to know, Social Media For Writers | Tweet
Let’s talk about Pinterest today, the social media network that seems to be an afterthought in many authors’ marketing strategies.
- How to create an index for your book in Adobe InDesign, The Book Designer | Tweet
A proper index can’t be produced automatically by your word processing software. An index is constructed from the concepts behind the terms and people cited within your book.
→Adobe InDesign CC Classroom in a Book
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HAPPINESS
As a therapist, the number-one goal I hear from my patients is: “I just want to be happy.” I ask, “What would being happy mean to you?” The answers range from “Everything I wish for will happen” to “I will feel good all the time” to “I won’t ever feel sad or disappointed.”
PSYCHOLOGY
Is the feeling of difference experienced by many bi- and multilinguals linked to a later age of onset (AoA) and a lower level of proficiency in the foreign language (LX)?
→The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language
HEALTH
- Why not even exercise will undo the harm of sitting all day–and what you can do it about it, Quartz | Tweet
A large review recently published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute confirms what we’ve been hearing for years: Sitting can be fatal.
BOOKS
- Let’s talk about genre: Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation, NewStatesman | Tweet
The two literary heavyweights talk about the politics of storytelling, the art of the swordfight and why dragons are good for the economy.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
- Why entrepreneurs who complain are setting themselves up to fail, Entrepreneur | Tweet
Your problems are proportional to the amount of time you spend complaining about your problems: The less you complain, the fewer problems you will have. This is because complaining about your problems keeps your attention on your problems. And attention generates force.
→Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: How I Went from Gang Member to Multimillionaire Entrepreneur
ENTERTAINMENT
It isn’t news that Hollywood likes to pair its older men with younger women, but as these charts will show, there’s surely something unusual going on when the three hottest actresses in the 30-and-under bracket are routinely steered toward men of a certain age.