It’s about more than self-evolution; isn’t it? I told one of my friends that I was looking at a lot of stoicism blogs lately. She snorted, raised an eyebrow and watched as her dog sniffed a sexy bush near the old, brick electric building and said, “Well, that’s super bro of you.” “Wait. What? You mean Stoicism…

This podcast we’re going to talk about our town’s purple fire snowstorm about 170 years ago and other weird things that happened in 1853…

Carrie Jones Books

“My heart aches,” he says as if that will change her mind. He quotes Keats, memorizes it the way others memorize song lyrics, Drunk, but not on hemlock or an opiate. Drunk One minute and the next. Keats is not pretentious enough a poet to impress Someone who sings with…

We’re talking about hooks here. So, last week I talked about hooking your readers. And I promised that I’d keep talking about it. I am keeping that promise. Hooking your reader might make you think of pirates and nasty horror movies, but it really just means keeping your readers actually reading your book. I’ve broken…

This weekend began with a car parked in our driveway that wasn’t ours. I didn’t notice. I heard the dog bark, but our Ring doorbell didn’t go off. And Pogie the puppy like to bark a bit when other dogs walk by the house. …

There’s this old book from 2007 by Les Edgerton called Hooked. And it’s all about writing “fiction that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go.” And one of the key things that Edgerton says is this “Novels and short stories, no matter how complex their plots may…

Maybe? Maybe not? And should you want it to? There’s a great post on Medium by Linda Caroll about whether or not us writers would pass an AI detector test. In her subhead, it says, “Don’t be too sure, lol.” I’m not so sure about the lol, honestly, but it’s…

Dogs are Smarter Than People podcast One of the big secrets of life be that it’s not about being risk averse, it’s about being regret averse. There’s a pretty well known story about Jeff Bezos, the guy who started Amazon. The story goes like this: Jeff Bezos quit his…