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Be Brave Friday

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Photo by Ìý´Ç²ÔÌý

I’m pretty bad at asking for help.

This is not because I think I’m the only person who can do something the “right� way. It’s because I’m afraid of being a bother, mostly.

The thing is that it’s hard to grow as a person if you don’t ask for help. It’s hard to grow as a business, too.

This November, Shaun and I asked for help for the , which is our daily local news site that we put out to everyone with no paywalls becau...

SHE NO LONGER IS

a poem

by Carrie Jones


My mother has been dead

And I do not count the years


Because I count no years for anything.

She no longer is, I tell people,


And those with empathy lean forward

And those without it lean away, tiny


Movements of bodies showing

The full resonance—or lack thereof—of their souls.

A storm hit the Maine coast this past Wednesday (Jan 10, 2024) and another is here now. That first storm decimated a lot of things on the coastline on our island. Dunes are gone. Seawalls made of rocks and boulders are gone. Pieces of road, some docks, and our beloved Shore Path have holes. Some fishing outbuildings are gone. It’s all a blow for the working waterfront and property owners and businesses. A shipwrecked schooner, , from 1911 has been unearthed and its bones are on Sa...

Spartacus was a great dogPhoto by Ìý´Ç²ÔÌý

There’s this  that posts poems by different writers. One of those poems was by Raymond Carver, a self-aware/self-loathing bit about writing a poem about his daughter’s dog’s death. There are a lot of reasons I found that poem today, but I can’t quite write about those reasons yet. Maybe I can by the end of the post.

Instead, I want to focus on what I saw on the comments.

For background, Raymond Carver died in 1988. The we...

So far we’ve talked (and written) twice about character misbeliefs. Then we took a baby break because we’re like that, but we’re back on it now, my friends.

Those earlier posts are linked below.

First off to recap, the big lie or character misbelief in your story is what motivates them or causes them to act in a certain way. If your character grows in a positive way, during the story, they usually realize by the end that the lie was a big ole lie and not a glorious simple truth and voila—l...

So, a lot of time, I have to remind myself that I’m a writer.

And to do that, I’ve started drafting poems each morning. They are poems that I will probably never actually look at again. But poems are actually why I started loving writing when I was little. Poems are the things that made my life better again and again and again. They saved me in second grade, in high school, junior year of college.

But, I never felt like my voice was refined enough to fit in the poetry world.

So, I st...

A poem for Monday!

I’ve been working on this painting a bit this week, but mostly staring at it and trying to figure it out. It is a bit of a homage to my cousin and her little girl (who isn’t so little now, but just so beautiful) and then it branches out into something bigger.

It gives me so many questions that I don’t have answers to yet. Do I even out the color, the brush strokes? Do I go into the trees? Do I paint it all over and start new?

My life is a bit like that, too. I feel like ...

I’ve been quietly writing poems first thing every morning for a couple of weeks now. I guess, it’s my idea of morning pages, which is a writer thing where you write in the morning. Or maybe like journaling, which is a self-help thing where you get your brain ready for the day.

So, I write a poem in the morning lately.

This morning’s poem is up there.

And I’ve been not-so-quietly writing a hyper-local news blog for about a year now. It gets about 70,000 views every month, which is p...

Don’t be too much.

AUG 10, 2023

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In real life, I can kind of be a lot if you know me. I’m pretty enthusiastic and exuberant like a puppy and this? Well, this is not for everyone.

And just like real life, sometimes book beginnings can be a bit too much.

So, when we writers talk about hooking readers, we talk about how to draw them in to the beginning of the story. It’s usually a lot of do’s rather than don’t, which is lovely because it’s lovely to be positi...