Writing helps sooth the savage beast…

There are many psychologists out there that will gladly tell you that art, in its varied forms, is a great therapeutic tool. Drawing is often used with children to help them deal with whatever is troubling them, helping them to express their thoughts on paper, albeit in a cryptic fashion.

Writing  is like that for me.Read More

Musical Support

Many of us have that one special someone in our lives that helps drive us forward. It doesn’t need to be a spouse or partner. It could be a parent, a sibling… a friend. They are the one person that will help you pick up the pieces when your world comes crashing down around you. For me, that one person is my husband.Read More

Editing Headaches…

Editing... The dreaded beast seems to have come to haunt me again. Just when I thought I had finished with this manuscript, there it is again. The revisions just go on, and on, and on, and on... Did I mention that they go on and on?

When you're writing, it's the inner critic that whispers sweet little nothings about self-doubt that just won't go away. If you're anything like me, you type so fast that sometimes your brain struggles to keep up; the spelling goes out the window and the autocorrect monster just gobbles up that carefully chosen word... without you noticing!

But the editor in me can't just let a new piece of writing go unchecked. I always go back and reread what I had written after a break (even a break as short as a toilet break). I see the punctuation errors, the grammar flaws, and the faults in the writing itself. I struggle in a big way to shut off the editor brain long enough to actually do any writing.

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Misinformed Fathers and Aftershocks…

She sat at the dining room table staring at the laptop. The nerves were shot and she wasn't getting much sleep, but one thing was helping with her mental sanity — her writing. Ironically, the anxiety brought on by the quaky earth fueled the tension of her story.

Her cell phone chimed. It was a message from her father. "Don't worry about clean up at work. It's in the street." Her jaw dropped. Without pause, she flicked over to her web browser and brought up the University of Canterbury website, searching for signs of what her father was talking about. Her heart raced out of control with worry for her colleagues. While she had been working from home when the quake hit, she had been in email communication with those in the lab. She was afraid that one of them had died and she didn't know.

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Telescope Gone — But History Survives

For over 100 years, residents of Christchurch, New Zealand were blessed to have access an operational, world-class telescope right in the heart of the city. The telescope was built in 1864 by Thomas Cooke and Sons of York, England, one of the best instrument designers of the time. It was then gifted to Canterbury College, as it was called back then, in 1891. The Townsend Observatory was constructed and opened in 1896. Since then, regular viewing was open to the public — until a 7.1 earthquake struck Canterbury on September 4, 2010.

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