‘Gaslighting’ is a term I’ve used for YEARS. Oddly, however, until recently, almost nobody knew what the heck I was talking about. I would have to explain about the movie from the 1940s, based off a 1938 play Gas Light. Anyway, it would just turn into a rambling conversation almost as awkward as when I […]

Over 40 countries have a day to celebrate ‘mother’ and ‘mother figures’ with some variation of Mother’s Day. While millions of people will send flowers and gifts and take their moms, grandmothers, aunts, etc. out for a fancy day, other folks might struggle…a lot. People can feel a wide variety of emotions when it comes […]

Small steps are the most essential for achieving anything in life, yet they’re also the most underestimated. They are too easy to overlook or dismiss. Unlike when we were kids, no one is handing out stickers or scented erasers to reward us for a day well done. There’s no list on the wall showcasing the […]

Fiction filler is like fillers in food. It makes a little bit of good stuff go a lot farther, but at what cost? How much of this pink slime prose can we really get away with before readers feel ill? Almost everyone has padded some form of writing—a school paper, essays, presentations, resumes, etc. In […]

Memory is a tricky thing. We like to believe our brains are like a video camera recording every detail of every event with perfect precision. Or at least I’m guilty of believing this…especially when at odds with someone. But, aside from memory making us martyrs, it serves many other useful purposes in life and in […]

Um…HUH? SEO, for those who might not know, stands for Search Engine Optimization. And right now, many of you might be like, “Well, great. THAT makes it clear as mud.” Today, we’re going to talk a little about search engines, how they work, and ways search engine optimization can make our content work harder so […]

Arc is critical in stories. How do the characters change? Who changes and how? What is an arc and do we need a protractor? In my last post, Personality Traits: Creating Dimensional Characters, we talked about how useful personality tests can be for character creation and balancing the party. Ideally, we want to have a […]

Personality traits make for not only a fascinating study, but have continued to be at the heart of spirited debate since probably the dawn of time. What makes up our personality? Where does it come from? Is it malleable? What forms our personalities? Nature, nurture or both? ***Apologies for the delay between blogs. Hubby and […]

Branding, at least for authors, is a relatively new concept. Selling books was SO much ‘easier’ before the digital age, when life ran at a comparable snail-hooked-on-Valium pace. Or it at least seems that way. If you need to remove those rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, I do recommend reading my post The Ugly Truth of Publishing […]

Psychology factors into most of what we do in modern life. Companies use psychology everywhere from human resources to building design. Understanding the human mind is a powerful tool. Though not always deployed ethically (for more on this, refer to the book I recently coauthored, The Trap: Sex, Social Media and Surveillance Capitalism), please appreciate […]