Category: My writing journey
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February Burn Out
February has been a tough month for me. I’ve had zero motivation to do anything productive and have fallen behind in all my goals for the year. Look back on last year February was rough month then too. I’m not sure if the weather, or finally coming down from the holiday season and New Year’s…
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The added weight of being a mom perusing a creative goal
Being a mom, whether you work or stay home, is hard, but there is a special kind of guilt that gets added to the pile when you’re also pressuring creative endeavors. I started to take my writing seriously when my oldest was 2 and I started to feel like my identity was slipping away. My…
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What’s to come in 2020
Welcome to 2020! Have you recovered from the holiday season yet? Things are starting to get back to normal around my house, which I’m grateful for. I have a lot of awesome stuff planned for the year and I’m ready to jump back into it after taking December off from writing. What awesome things do…
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A look back at 2019
As 2019 comes to a close I wanted to take a look back at everything I accomplished this year. This was the first time I used a time keeper to keep track of the time I spent on writing related activities and for 2019 I spent 420 hours working on my writing. Since I’m a…
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My fear of failure and the creation of Crystal Wolf
I’ve always had a deep-seated fear of failure, long before I even know what to call it. It’s the reason I never volunteered an answer in school even when I was confident I was right. The risk that I was wrong, and everyone would know it, wasn’t worth it to me. It’s the reason it…
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Crystal and Flint Deleted Scenes
I love watching deleted scenes from movies. Those little moments that didn’t make the final cut, but can still give insight in the characters and stories. Just like in movies there are a lot of scenes that get cut when writing book. There’s lots of reasons why a scene gets cut. It might not move…
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“That’s how it should always be.”
A few weeks ago I had the chance to sit down and talk to one of my readers. She’s the young teen daughter of a friend of mine from school. She was staying with her grandmother in our old neighborhood and I went over to give her a copy of Family Binds and I was…
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The power of owning your title
A little over a year ago, we got a new executive director for my department at work. As is always the case when there is new top management, he had grand plans for how to change things. He told us a story about visiting some start up tech company where all the employees were called…
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What to do when your first draft is a huge dumpster fire
With the release of Family Binds just 16 days away, it’s time to start working on book 3 in The Journey Missions series, Thicker Than Blood. In book 3 Crystal, Desi, Justin, Grady, and Tyler are sent to Earth to speak in a military hearing on the benefits of the officer exchange program to try…
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How a Story Changes: A Look Back at the First Draft of Crystal and Flint
I was preparing to speak at a career day a few months ago and was trying to pull together a visual to use to show just how much work goes into getting a book ready for publication. In digging through all the printed drafts I had, I stumbled upon the very first draft for Crystal…
Holly Ash 