Do you care what kind of pen Oprah uses? Curious about what kind of notebook novelist Colleen Hoover prefers? Would eating Hemingway’s breakfast give you Hemingway-sized talent? You can certainly try: Truffle omelette, Canadian bacon, and tea. And a Bloody Mary to ease the hangover. (Yes, of course I looked it up.) It’s interesting to…

I’ve been feeling weird. This whole second half of August has been like one long, awkward pause. I’m not good with too much downtime. When things are quiet, the mind will play tricks. Some of my recent interactions have felt…charged. I feel restless. I have a mild toothache, this one tooth that’s feeling ultra sensitive,…

The Netflix doc of Woodstock ’99 is called Trainwreck. And that about sums it up. Of course, you wouldn’t have caught me DEAD at that concert. I was 26 years old, and even then, was not a fan of relatively mild outdoor concerts. The heat. Nowhere to sit. Port-o-potties. $20 lemonades. No. Thank. You. The…

The literary world was abuzz recently when soon-to-be debut author Jumi Bello confessed in an essay on Literary Hub to plagiarizing parts of her debut novel, “The Leaving,” which was then yanked from Riverhead’s summer lineup. The New York Times reports: “The essay chronicled her history with mental illness and the pressures of producing a debut…

How long have you been “working on your talk?” My guess: Too long. If there’s no deadline, you can work on it forever. And it will take about that long. We don’t give talks because they’re “ready.” We give talks because it’s time. And because nothing can put you on people’s radar like being right…

Just as we’re all writers, we’re all speakers. You don’t have to make your living traveling the world doing keynotes. EVERY time you stand up in front of a room with other people in it, or speak up, even if you remain sitting. You’re public speaking. Period the end. It’s not something just professional speakers…

We all feel resistance around things we don’t want to do. But ever feel resistance around things you actually want to do? How maddening is that? Public speaking is one of those things. It’s easy to just not do it.  But the people who struggle with it aren’t those who flat-out refuse; they’re the ones…

The two images below were taken almost exactly a year apart. The image on the left is what my book manuscript looked like when I was trying to figure it all out. The image on the right was taken a year later (a week ago). As finished as it will ever be. It easy to…