Why Resets Are a Necessary Part of Your Writing Schedule
I haven’t posted here in a couple of weeks, and there’s a good reason for that. Actually, there are several.
Tracy Cooper-Posey
Smell the Coffee? What About That Turkey Stuffing?
Hot plum pudding with brandy sauce. Pumpkin pie, fresh out of the oven, melting into the custard. Home-baked cookies, or a cake cooling on the counter. You can smell them before you even see them.
Or maybe it’s red wine steeped with cinnamon and cloves—the siren song of mulled wine calling you home on a winter’s night.
Croissants in Paris, still warm, with real butter and even more real European coffee—dark, rich, and blessed with that smoky caramel scent you only get from beans grown halfway across the world.
Roasts. Gravy. Toasted bread. Spiced fruit. Deep-fried anything.
Why Do You Write?
Ah yes, that question. “Why do you write?”
It’s one of those that gets asked a lot—especially in writing forums, interviews, and on the back covers of literary memoirs, usually printed in italics for some reason. It can feel a bit… woo-woo. As if the answer should be sacred and profound. (“Because the Muse demands it, obviously.”)
But the truth? Your “why” is probably a lot more practical, changeable, and occasionally downright grubby than the question makes it sound.
Still Flying: Why Amelia Earhart’s Mystery Might Be Better Unsolved
There’s something about a good mystery that just gets under your skin, isn’t there? The kind that makes you sit up a little straighter when it shows up in a documentary at 11:30 p.m. and suddenly you have to know what happened. Amelia Earhart is one of those mysteries. Maybe the mystery.
Turn Off Editing and Spelling While You Type. And Why.
So, shiny new laptop in hand, I reinstalled all my software. And, of course, Microsoft Word came back with all its default bells and whistles cheerfully intact—including the dreaded live spelling and grammar check. Outlook, OneNote, the rest of the MS Office gang… same story.
Online editing tools weren’t far behind, either. And if you’ve got a grammar extension active while you’re writing in a browser, you’ll get treated to an assault of blue double-underscores that scream “BAD GRAMMAR!” like a judgy primary school teacher.
Subsonic, Supersonic, Hypersonic—The Hidden World of Bullets in Romantic Suspense
Have you ever been curled up with a romantic suspense novel, flipping pages like your life depended on it, and paused just long enough to wonder, Wait, do all bullets do the same thing? No? Just me?
Change Your Narrative, Change Your Writing Life
Ever feel like a fraud? Like you’re just pretending to be a writer until someone finds out you’re not legit? Or maybe you keep calling yourself lazy, undisciplined, or “just not that good.”
Yeah. You’re not alone.
Love Letters Across Time: A Romance Author’s Take on the World’s Oldest Message in a Bottle
Imagine strolling along a beach, hand in hand with your love, the salty breeze curling around you, the sun dipping low on the horizon. Romantic, right? Now, imagine bending down, picking up an old glass bottle, and discovering a 132-year-old message inside.
Writing a Lot Isn’t Intimidating—It’s Just Math
I’ve spent the last couple of posts being pretty firm about the importance of doing the work. In Hauling the Bricks and The Indie Author’s Scam Survival Guide, we talked about how there’s no magic shortcut—just putting in the effort, day after day, is what gets you there.
Why I Write Under a Pen Name
I’m pretty open these days about the fact that Cameron Cooper is a pen name. But that wasn’t always the case.