Category Archives: A Writer’s Journey

Being a writer and editor with dyslexia

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I have dyslexia, diagnosed at the age of nine with two separate forms. Reading was incredibly difficult, but I learned to adapt. And I refuse to let it label me as something I'm not.

When people learn that I have dyslexia, it often comes as a bit of surprise. I am a writer and a professional editor, after all. I spend a lot of time behind the computer or with my nose stuck in a book. So, it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that someone would question my career choice when they hear the truth about my history.

There is still a lot of negative stigma surrounding dyslexia, but what people don't realize is that the majority of the people on the planet have one form or another of dyslexia—but they just don't know it.

For most people, their form is so weak that they were able to easily compensate. However, for approximately 15% of American children [1], for 30 to 50% of prisoners around the world [2], the dyslexic forms are severe enough to cause significant issues.

Today, a friend of mine, Beth Beamish, is releasing a book about what it's like to be a parent of a dyslexic child, with practical advice on how parents can help their children through this.

Dyslexia is not a disease. It's just a different way of seeing the world.

To help Beth Beamish spread the word about her book, I thought it might be a good idea to share my own story, highlighting that having dyslexia doesn't stop you from following your dreams, whatever those dreams might be.

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Social Media Realignment Experiment 2.0

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The first step in dealing with any addiction is to recognize that you have a problem. So…

"Hi, my name is Judy, and I'm addicted to social media."

Social media and I have weird relationship, and yes, addiction is part of that. I'm obsessed with understanding how security works on the platforms, but the moment I'm in there…

"Oh, look… Some useless post about red carpet fashion disasters… or the latest chaos among the British royal family… or how the children of stars look like their parents."

I'm a sucker for the meaningless and boring… and there just went my precious writing time.

Back in July 2020, I posted about the Social Media Realignment Experiment. It was an attempt to realign my social media usage to my professional goals. Quitting all social media wasn't an option for me, but my everyday usage was out of control.

However, in the original experiment, I was too vague on what I wanted to achieve. So, it's time to kick the Social Media Realignment Experiment into Version 2.0.

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US Law and Cellphones

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I will admit that I have a morbid interest in crime and criminal investigations. My brain is happy to think about what nasty things bad guys can get up to. As a fiction writer, that is not only going to be bad, it's going to lean towards pure evil—then take it one step further.

My stories are primarily set in the US, which means I have to spend a significant amount of time getting my head around various aspects of US law and police procedures. With there being differences between federal, state, and country (sometimes even city), it can seriously do the head in.

But the joys of being a fiction writer, I only need to be plausible. Not everything I read about US law will make its way into one of my manuscripts, but some readers might be interested in learning about the technological aspects of US law that I uncovered.

Today, it’s the little quirk associated with looking at an arrestee’s smartphone.

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Woman watching the sunset

The Social Media Realignment Experiment: Update

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Back in July, I decided that I needed to do something about my out-of-control habits on social media. I was spending far too much time wasting the day away on something that had little importance on my daily life.

While social media has been my lifeline to the outside world for years, I've realized how toxic that environment has become. And with everything else going on in the world, for the sake of my mental sanity, something needed to be done.

So, I set out on a mission to realign my social media habits with my goals and aspirations—and it has been a struggle.

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The Social Media Realignment Experiment

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As part of my daily routine, I track how much time I spend on various tasks. I keep a note of the time I start a particular task and the time I finish. At different points throughout the day, normally when I take a break, I enter my notes into a spreadsheet that calculates the exact time I've spent on different tasks and tallies it up across the day, the week, the month, or any other time frame I want.

I will admit that it is a fancy spreadsheet system that I developed, but it works for me.

One task I track is how much time I spend on social media. Being the person who I am, trying to understand the dangers associated with social media and online activities, I need to spend some time on social media. But I am not immune to the time-suck that can occur.

In tracking my social media habits, there have been times when I have whittled away the entire day on social media. In the last month alone, I've spent 24 hours on social media and reading blogs. That might not sound like a lot, but that's approximately one hour per day spent scrolling through the feeds. Yes, it is not 100% doing nothing, as some of it is interacting with writers under my editor's hat, providing advice and building those valuable connections, but it is an hour a day that I could have been writing.

It is time for me to do a reassessment of my social media platform and to reevaluate exactly how much of that time I spend on social media and what I do while I'm there. Time to bring things back into alignment with my goals as a writer and editor.

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