It’s time to put on my big boy pants.

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It’s time to put on my big boy pants.

August 28, 2021August 28, 2021 389

Ever since this business was launched way back in 2002, record keeping, client info, writer info, project assignments and all that fun stuff has been on paper. The result of that has been me drowning in paper. So, in the interest of not drowning in paper and saving some trees that haven’t yet burned in endless gigantic forest fires, and saving a lot of time (at my age, I need all I can get), I signed up for a client relationship management service called Monday.com.

I will be implementing this immediately, as soon as I understand it. Which means watching tutorial videos, making stupid mistakes and wasting the valuable time of their tech support people. I can hear them talking now: “It’s that geezer again, Joanna. You wanna take him this time?” Fortunately, there are a lot of templates available at no extra cost, which will shorten the learning curve.

Upward and onward. I hope.

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.

George Singleton

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy