Like I've done every year for the past however long, my blog went on a partial hiatus for the summer because of my day job going into extended hours and my desire to prioritize my fiction projects in that time. But even though I was doing my best to put my writing first in my free time, there were plenty of spans where it got pushed aside. But now September is here, and it's time to get serious again. I'm putting myself on a PIP. AKA, a Performance Improvement Plan. PIPs are

If you have ever interacted with me on an average Sunday, I can all but guarantee you know the following: I am a Bengals fan. I take fantasy football a little too seriously for someone who knows next to nothing about football. My fantasy football team is inexplicably, unconditionally, and irrevocably cursed (or whatever Bella Swan said). That is no exaggeration, I assure you. Since pretty much my first season, my fantasy football team has suffered a long streak of injuries, s

I didn't have a typical high school experience. Sure, I had the standard classes, homecoming and prom, extracurriculars, SATs, and my fair share of the teenage milestones one might expect. But my school wasn't your typical high school. It was a technical high school. Sometimes known as vocational high schools or trade high schools, tech schools offer your standard academic classes like English and math, but also allow students to enroll in a trade. At my school, these include

I recently sent the first three chapters of Project Scrimmage off to my writing group for feedback. There were a few specific things I asked them to keep an eye out for as they were reading, but I was mostly wanting a vibe check. I noticed several patterns in the comments. To be honest, they're not exactly anything new. I have quite a few, what I'd call, first draft pitfalls. Little habits I've yet to break and things that tend to be absent in the earliest drafts of any given

Back in March, I finally started my YouTube channel after talking myself out of it and putting it off for a long time. It's still an itsy-bitsy corner of the internet, and I still have plenty of things to figure out when it comes to my videos, but I'm having fun, and that's all that matters to me right now. That doesn't mean I don't think about things like monetization. It's not a goal I'm actively chasing per se. If anything, I see it more as a potential supplemental income

For most of my writing journey, I've considered myself a Plantser, the kind of writer who goes into a new WIP with a vague outline but also isn't afraid to explore and see where the story goes—even if that means veering away from that outline. However, for a lot of that time, I've also tried to make myself into a Plotter. Sometimes Planners, they're the writers who tend to do a significant amount of prep work ahead of a new project, which might include heavily detailed outlin