It’s that moment when you’re staring at your blinking cursor: There are only three hundred words until it’s due. For those of us who writes under strict rules, it generates a certain kind of writerly panic. It’s like you’re constructing a house in a shoe box, and you want to make sure there’s enough space […]

It’s a time management trap common to all audio listeners: there on the screen are two things you want to listen to, a pile of podcasts or an audiobook that’ll take fourteen hours to get through. Neither one appear likely to be completed by next Tuesday. Of course, we think to ourselves “Oh, it won’t […]

For flash fiction writers, a couple extra words makes us panic. We’ve got the twist just right and placed the last image like a master touch. We double-checked to make sure we didn’t go over, only to find out we’re at one-hundred-and-one words. A gratuitous pronoun, a misplaced adjective, and the whole thing cave in […]

Or: You’re halfway through your 80,000-word novel, having written exactly 42,000 words. Cold dislike glares back at you from the blinking cursor. On one hand, you’re proud; on the other, you’re petrified: Forty-eight thousand more words remain before the deadline arrives. Which means you’ll need to type them all right now, right? You might do […]