One of the biggest struggles that we have as authors is keeping focused on doing our job in a world that is full of distraction. And I’m talking about distractions like family, the day job, sleep, and the need to occasionally eat. Not having time to write (or procrastinating away that time) is one of the top problems that we writers have. I know that the busier I get, the harder it is for me to stick to my writing schedule. I’m sure the same goes for all of us. What’s a poor, busy writer to do? I’ve recently discovered a fabulous way to stay on task and to receive encouragement from other writers who are in the same boat as I am. You’ve heard of critique groups and writing partners, well, I recently joined an accountability group. We're all in this together photo by Liam Quinn via Flickr Commons So what’s an accountability group and how does that help the writing process? The accountability group that I belong to was organized as an off-shoot of another, much larger w...

Today is a special day in my writing world. It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death in 2001. And if you’re asking yourself how the anniversary of the death of someone so close to me can be important to my writing, well, it’s all about support. Writing is a solitary endeavor, but it takes an impressive support network to be able to push through the writer’s block and the deadlines, the rewrites and the rejection. That’s not even counting the life of a book after it’s published. But for a lot of us, the influence of family starts long before that. Raise your hand if you owe at least half of what you know in terms of human interactions, good and bad, to your family. I’m definitely raising my hand here. A wise friend of mine once said that we aren’t given our family as a source of unlimited support, we’re actually given our family so that we can experience every possible bad thing and trying emotion in a contained environment in order to prepare us for the world. In a writer’s best-...