Dogs Are Smarter Than People via Anchor
313 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsWelcome to Dogs are Smarter Than People with NYT and internationally bestselling quirky human author Carrie Jones, her slightly more normal husband, Shaun, and their dogs. Life tips. Writing tips. Dog noises. It's all here.
Bonus episodes of BE BRAVE FRIDAYS (telling people's stories of bravery) and LOVING THE STRANGE (all about celebrating the weird) and author-to-author interviews. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/carriejonesbooks/support
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
It is Super Natural: Four Basic Elements To Your Story
August 24, 2022 12:08 - 6 minutes - 9.12 MBHey! It's quick writing tip time and this go around it's all about motivation reaction units and the four elements of structure. To read all the transcript, head over to https://carriejonesbooks.blog To read part two, head over to my substack, LIVING HAPPY. Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for y...
Dogs Cry Happy Tears When You Come Home Maybe We Should Too
August 23, 2022 14:07 - 19 minutes - 26.2 MBThis week's episode is all about dogs that cry happy tears when their people come home; how social media is potentially messing up teens; and how empathy is a badass super power that needs to swoop in and save us all. For full notes go here to Carrie's blog. SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s ...
When I Was Born They Thought I Was Blind
August 22, 2022 12:44 - 2 minutes - 3.39 MBHi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include: My spoken voice My raw poems. Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too! When I Was Born They Thought I Was Blind The bandages on my face keep everything dark, so dark, and there’s nothing to figure out, no doubles of things, no blu...
Desire vs danger, it's what your story is about
August 17, 2022 16:01 - 6 minutes - 8.91 MBDwight Swain has a book, The Techniques of a Selling Writer, and there’s a chapter (well many) that talk about story structure, but one specifically begins like this: Swain“All stories are ‘about’ the same thing: desire versus danger.” So that’s a really good place to start. Complete podcast notes are here. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you fo...
Do NOT hide in a stuffed bear when running from the cops and where the hell is the empathy, you jerks
August 16, 2022 11:05 - 22 minutes - 31.1 MB“You can’t love someone or something without relating to its existence,” says musician Pharrell Williams in a MasterClass about empathy. “In order to relate, you have to empathize.” For Williams, it’s about changing your vantage point. “A lack of POV is a lack of context” he says, and when you don’t have a context then you can’t understand the greater situation that’s around you. It’s like you’re looking at just the mountain in front of you and don’t realize that there’s an entire landscape...
The Hurricane
August 15, 2022 14:01 - 1 minute - 2.38 MBThanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too! "The Hurricane" The workers at the Hole in the Wall catalogue their friends’ losses to the group of diners that come in and sit at a high table. One friend has lost a porch. Another lost their oyster building. Another lost half their roof. Someone lost a car to a big tree. Someone and someone else and someone else lost their homes. The hurricane just took their entire world...
MAKING THINGS SIZZLE – HOW DO YOU MAKE CHEMISTRY HAPPEN BETWEEN CHARACTERS
August 10, 2022 13:35 - 8 minutes - 11.7 MBWant to make your characters sizzle like a fajita plate? Join us as we quickly give some steps about building character chemistry on the page. More tips and the transcript are over at Carrie Jones Books. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Mr.ruiz and the track is Arctic Air and the album is Winter Haze Summer Daze. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/carriejonesbooks/me...
Brad Pitt in a Skirt and Mixing Things Up in Your Relationships To Make Them Last
August 09, 2022 15:03 - 17 minutes - 23.7 MBOne of the key components of happiness and living a good life is having a good close relationship with someone else and for a lot of us, our closest relationship is with our spouse. Cough. So join us, an old married couple, as we discuss this horrifying news. All the notes and sources are over here. SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who ...
Character Development and Novel Structures are Creepy Besties. Here's why.
August 03, 2022 16:14 - 5 minutes - 8.23 MBNOVEL STRUCTURE AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT ARE RELATED. Not just that, they are creepy best friends. You know the kind. They do EVERYTHING together, drink the same soy-caramel latte, have the same crushes on Bowen Yang, borrow each other’s Sketchers. . . Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts, their transcripts, and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so t...
Are you a cheerleading mutant?
August 02, 2022 16:20 - 17 minutes - 23.8 MBCheerleading mutant. It sounds pretty awful, but it’s actually a good thing. Because that optimism and gratitude help make your brain healthier and life better. That gives you the sort of cheerleading persona, but where does the mutant come in? Hang on and we’re going to tell you . . . SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and...
spoiler: the sandwich is an objective correlative
August 01, 2022 10:40 - 1 minute - 2.22 MBA poem about being not poet-cool. Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobs...
WTF EVEN IS A SCENE
July 27, 2022 17:05 - 5 minutes - 7.79 MBA scene. Let's have a quick rundown about it and why you need to know about this bad boy. It’s this element of structure for the story. We all write them, but sometimes it seems like this overlooked aspect of our stories. I’m not sure why this is. It’s not as elemental as the word or punctuation. It’s not as long and sexy as a chapter. It’s not as easily diagramed as a sentence, right? But it’s so important. There’s an old book by Raymond Obstfeld called Crafting Scenes and in its first ...
Sometimes a robot breaks your finger how to live happy anyway
July 26, 2022 13:06 - 17 minutes - 23.6 MBIn possibly the goofiest self-help podcast ever, we continue our bizarre ways with some advice from the Dalai Lama about how to live happy despite everything and also talk a bit about the robot who broke the kid's finger during a chess tournament in Russia. As always, our notes and links to sources are at carriejonesbooks.blog, and . . . The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and t...
PROS AND CONS OF PRESENT AND PAST TENSE
July 20, 2022 12:59 - 9 minutes - 13.5 MBHey! It's a quick rundown on the positives and negatives of writing in past or present tense. For the complete notes, check out the blog. Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in us, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from ...
Nap Like an Ancient Warrior and Do Not Live in A Museum
July 19, 2022 13:36 - 15 minutes - 21.2 MBThis episode is all about napping and Carrie accidentally outing herself about her-cough-3 p.m. nap spree. Full notes are at carriejonesbooks.blog SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/carri...
Astonishers. Gaspers. Screamers. What your exclamation point addiction or avoidance says about you.
July 13, 2022 19:47 - 6 minutes - 9.38 MBLately, I’ve been working with a lot of writers who are sending in their stories and they seem to have a great fear of the mighty exclamation point. And I get it. I get their concerns, the exclamation point has a pretty bad rap. We’ve all seen stories where every bit of dialogue ends in an exclamation point. Or our boss sends us an email and everything is a sentence fragment ending with that exclamation point. The BBC even has an article about what overusing the exclamation point says abou...
Naked Florida Man and Multitasking is Stupid
July 12, 2022 12:33 - 17 minutes - 24.7 MBWe talk about the naked Florida man in the random section of the podcasts. We don’t transcribe that part, and believe me, you don’t wbut here’s the link to the article. but here’s the link to the article. So I’ve been reading this book called The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin. Anyone who has had wine with me (or a rum and root beer) will know eventually that cognitive neuroscience is my b...
Large Dongs, Marital Hate and Have Trevor Noah and Terry Real Figured Some S- Out?
July 05, 2022 21:08 - 26 minutes - 36.1 MBSHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free. The full notes are here. https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/marital-hate-and-have-trevor-noah-and-terry-real-figured-some-s-out/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/carriejonesbooks/mess...
Huck the Roof Dog and Defining Happiness Doggy Style
June 28, 2022 12:38 - 18 minutes - 25.3 MBEvery once in awhile, a dog climbs on the roof of a house and chills out, but if you’re Huck the dog, you do this all the time. How often? So often that your owner has to put a sign on the door. Join us as we talk about Huck and also about defining happiness, doggy style. All the episode notes and links are here at https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/ LINKS AND RESOURCES https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/11/dalai-lama-arthur-brooks-each-us-can-break-cycle-hatred/ XIV, Da...
Because
June 27, 2022 14:13 - 2 minutes - 3.97 MBBecause she’s not some drugged up doper or anything like that, but shivers have taken control of her whole entire body because it’s cold, cold, cold in Bar Harbor, Maine and it isn’t even winter yet. Because she’s huddled behind the dumpster outside of Geddy’s. There’s a giant lobster claw at the front part of the restaurant and a massive moose on top of the ceiling because that’s what gets the tourists. Fake moose. Broiled monster lobster claws, red with death and sprinkled with white Chri...
Fill Your Setting With Farts
June 22, 2022 11:26 - 6 minutes - 8.46 MBA quick ramble about setting. Writers, you need it. You might not want it. You might not be good at it, but setting is like a good fart. Sometimes you have to expel a little gas out of your rectum in order to be your best. All the notes for this podcast don't fit here, but you can find them over at Carrie's main blog. Hey, thanks for listening to Write Better Now. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Ev...
Topless Mom Saving Her Pet Goose and Smile Like You're Happy, Damn It
June 21, 2022 11:26 - 13 minutes - 18 MBBack in 1862 Duchenne De Boulogne noticed that certain muscles in our face engaged whenever we were joyous. It was an involuntary reaction of our cheek muscles, the zygomatic major, and the orbicularis oculi. That’s a muscle right in front of our temples and below our eye. And when those cheek muscles and that special little muscle engage? That’s when we smile. The weird thing is this is a human universal. It happens all over the world despite gender, sex, culture, race, etc. The weird th...
Myths of Presidents
June 20, 2022 15:01 - 2 minutes - 3.95 MBMyths About Presidents 26. He didn’t Ride A moose. The photo is fake Like a lot Of presidential things. 16. He dreamt His death, Found himself Waking in a coffin And asked who Was dead In the White House. Dream mourners said, “The president.” He denied the dream. Nobody listened. The story was too good. 9. He stood At the podium, Sworn in And speechifying For 8,445 words In the cold Of March. He died A month later Of pneumonia Linked to His pontification I...
Show More Details, Writers, Quick Writing Tips
June 15, 2022 19:03 - 5 minutes - 7.13 MBShowing details in your writing isn’t just some annoying comment that agents, editors, and writing coaches and teachers paste into every student’s work. You can see it now, right? Big red letters. Loopy script. Maybe an exclamation point. Join us as we give you a couple hints about how to do that. All the podcast notes and links are at carriejonesbooks.com There's a ton of writing tips and all sorts of wildness over there. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website,...
YOU HAVE COGNITIVE BIAS! So, how do you stop it, you fava bean hater.
June 15, 2022 00:51 - 16 minutes - 23.3 MBCognitive bias is a big deal because it's keeping you from making the right decisions. This is the start of our five-part series (of awesome) for a weird look at the types of bias and Shaun scoffing at all of them in a judgmental way. Hey! All our show notes and links are here. https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/you-are-so-biased-so-how-do-you-stop-it/ Please like and subscribe because it's a nice thing to do. And we'll love you forever. SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shorte...
Twenty Years Outdated, a poem
June 13, 2022 11:59 - 3 minutes - 4.59 MBThese firefighters show up at a hotel fire, maybe Started in the laundry room during the off season, hoses Frozen from winter temperatures, ice across roads; The crumbling structure is about to fall, flames shooting out windows. In our small town, three-hundred people Are listening to the scanner because we can’t be there, But our family and friends battle, wearing air Compressors and safety equipment from 2002. Twenty years outdated. Other poets write about grief and hand holdi...
Three Big Pieces To Building a Story
June 08, 2022 14:58 - 6 minutes - 9.06 MBHi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us. Story is basically a sequence of events, right? And to create a story you have to put that sequence of events together in a way that’s going to jive to the reader or for the reader. To do that you need scenes, which make up that sequence of events. A...
No More Elvis and the Cost of Alienation
June 07, 2022 12:54 - 16 minutes - 23 MBNo More Elvis and the Cost of Alienation There's a high cost to being alienated from our society. Full notes on carriejonesbooks.blog --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/carriejonesbooks/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/carriejonesbooks/support
Holes and Vettes
June 06, 2022 12:26 - 3 minutes - 5.12 MBHoles and Vettes Bar Harbor. Maine. 2022. A baseball field. Corvettes line up in rows, engines still For once and owners preening From their folding chairs, legs poking Into the same grass that supports Life Flight helicopters in emergencies And soccer cleats. This earth withstands so much. It’s a yearly gathering that’s paused two years Thanks to global disease, but now the drivers Are all maskless and showing off Their cars to locals who wander Between the lines, marveli...
A Quick Point of View Overview
May 25, 2022 20:14 - 7 minutes - 10.1 MBFirst, we should define point of view just in case you need a refresher. Truth is, we all often need a refresher even when we don’t want to admit it. Point of view is all about who is talking and/or telling the story. YOUR NEXT QUESTION IS: IS THERE ONE NARRATOR OR MANY? AND WHO THE HECK IS IT? That’s really one of the first questions you want to think about. You have to decide if you’re going to have just one point of view in your story or a lot. A lot of our stories follow one charact...
King Kong Trolls
May 23, 2022 15:24 - 2 minutes - 3.15 MBHi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include: My spoken voice My raw poems. Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too! King Kong Trolls The self-appointed writer-guru on Substack with four- thousand devotees to his biweekly missives has decided there are no more...
Writers Get Addicted to Things Not Just Drugs and Booze and Coffee
May 18, 2022 13:21 - 7 minutes - 11 MBHi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us. Sometimes us writers become a little stylistic. We get addictions. We might fall in love with the ellipses or certain words. Or, we might forget things like what a comma splice is or—gasp—what a sentence is. Yes, I said it. Sometimes writers forget w...
Flirts, Take Charge of Your Biological Clock.
May 18, 2022 00:40 - 14 minutes - 19.5 MBThere’s this thing called a biological clock and it’s basically the timer of a bunch of things that your body does. It controls when you go to sleep, when you shoot out an egg, when your energy is high and when it crashes. People who work third shift or whose shifts change have biological clocks that get all scattered. This happens to people who travel big distances too, right? We call it jet lag. But even in a normal day we sometimes are more energetic and sometimes we are dragging and ju...
Loneliness
May 16, 2022 14:09 - 3 minutes - 4.31 MBLoneliness He is known as he enters the emergency room, jeans sagging off his waist as an orderly ambles To meet him. He is hunching at the precipice between lobby and hall, intake and bathroom, and Ready to be seen. It is hard to be seen these days in a little Maine town full of tourists If you are Old. It is only easy right here, right now, in the liminal space before becoming A patient. We watch him totter, trying to decide. Go in? Stay out? Become Or remain. Before we arrived here ...
A Couple Tips On How to Write More Engagingly
May 11, 2022 18:57 - 7 minutes - 10.8 MBHere are some fast and dirty writing tips today that’s going to make your writing more intense. Ready? Think about your tenses What’s that mean? It means don’t be writing like things are happening now and then shift over to writing like things were happening in the past. If you want the most immediate writing experience, write in the present tense. If you want a little padding? Write it in the past tense. HERE’S A QUICK EXAMPLE: I lost feeling on my entire left side of my body during our...
You can totally hack into other people’s heads and mess with their memories and we do it to ourselves all the time
May 10, 2022 11:21 - 18 minutes - 25 MBYou can totally hack into other people’s heads. It sounds dastardly, right? But you can tweak other people’s memories. On Mind Hacks, Heather Fishel cites the work of Dr. Jon Lieff and writes: “Once an event occurs and time moves on, it becomes a part of your memory. Each time you recall that event and its details—smells, sounds, details, and so on—you’re not, in fact, remembering the original moment. Instead, you’re recalling the last time you remembered that memory.” But it’s more than ...
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me. A dog poem
May 09, 2022 14:00 - 3 minutes - 5.18 MBHi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include: My spoken voice My raw poems. Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too! "Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me." We were visiting Mom’s best friend, An aunt who wasn’t an aunt, She taught school, the job my mother drea...
Pot Food at the Wedding and Positive Motivation Theory
May 04, 2022 00:25 - 18 minutes - 25.1 MBLast week on WRITE BETTER NOW, we talked about fear for our characters as we write, and not all of you are writers, but I bet a lot of you are characters. Sorry! We couldn’t help teasing you there. Anyway, FEAR is great when it comes to writing novels and short stories and getting our characters to do things proactively on the page. But in real life? Eh . . . It can be a problem. A lot of us use fear to motivate us to do things. Sometimes we do this consciously. Sometimes we do this subc...
Mourning
May 02, 2022 13:56 - 1 minute - 2.74 MBWe walked by a grave that late spring day, And there were no clouds, as if God had refused to cast the sky With bit players. We thought of you as a tractor drove by; —You had loved tractors, laughter, play. Mourners claimed the tractor was a sign That you were here with us in spirit somehow Embodied in a John Green tractor with a plow And some of us believed and inhaled the pine Smells of New Hampshire and home. But a tractor is not a dad And nothing can take away the sad. You le...
The Big Scary Fear Monster Is Really the Rock Star of Your Novel
April 27, 2022 14:31 - 4 minutes - 6.57 MBHi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us. One of my favorite writing exercises is super simple. I take a bunch of novelists and ask them: What is your protagonists more afraid of happening than anything else in the whole freaking universe? We authors talk a lot about what our characters want...
Are you really a couple if you don’t drink each other’s blood and how not to be overwhelmed
April 27, 2022 00:14 - 12 minutes - 17 MBIn our random thoughts we talk all about drinking each other’s blood. Thanks, Megan Fox and MGK. That part isn't transcribed. HERE’S THE REST OF THE PODCAST THOUGH. So, this is going to be a short podcast because we’re going to give you some super simple advice this week. Ready? BLOW OFF YOUR PHONE Your phone rings? You don’t recognize the phone number? Don’t answer it. Seriously. Every single time your phone rings and it’s not a number you know, it means it could be a spammer wasting...
Every Day, a poem
April 25, 2022 14:40 - 1 minute - 2.33 MBEvery Day The puppy galloped through the garden While the Fed-Ex guy told me about how His brain was fried. People keep offering Me beer, he says. They say they’ll hide it in my water bottle, but one accident and I’ll lose my job. God, I need it though. The tourists make everything harder as they walk Down the center of the streets. Cruise ships Anchor in the harbor. One has a giant slide That goes all the way around the ship, even on the outside. I feel like I’m on that every day...
Don’t Be Chunky – Put Your Dialogue in Paragraphs
April 20, 2022 12:14 - 8 minutes - 11.5 MBHi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us. It’s a super quick writing tip again today. Ready? When you’re writing dialogue, make every new speaker a new paragraph. If you’re writing kids books? You might as well just keep each dialogue a paragraph of their own? Why? Our brains are wired to re...
Condoms in Easter Eggs Saying Yes and A Little Sex Talk
April 19, 2022 11:41 - 13 minutes - 18.7 MBSome things you just don’t want to say yes to like say passing out condoms in Easter eggs at your kids school, but other times? You do want to say yes. Improvisational comedians and actors know that every time they go up on the stage with no script, they are vulnerable. What if they just stand there and no ideas come? It’s the same as writers looking at a blank page. Or podcasters staring at an empty sound file. But with improvisers, they can ask the audience for ideas. “Give me a noun,...
Celebrity
April 18, 2022 18:00 - 1 minute - 2.43 MBHi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include: My spoken voice My raw poems. Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too! "Celebrity" Your life could be hated so much. Once celebrated, you must know the joy—never. Sitting by the sky’s vastness, Listening to the screams Hitting yo...
Quick Grammar Break Some Day vs Someday
April 13, 2022 16:42 - 3 minutes - 4.34 MBHi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us. No lofty talk about exposition or your story’s theme this week. Instead, we’re going back to basics with an easy grammar tip. Some day (two words) vs. someday (one word). It’s a debate that happens on the page over and over. Here’s how it works. Som...
Stop Stomping on People and Squirrels in Subarus
April 12, 2022 19:39 - 15 minutes - 21.8 MBThere was recently a piece by a lawyer/poet critiquing a younger, more celebritified (we made up that word) poet that caused a bit of an uproar for multiple reasons. Here’s the thing: Just because a poem doesn’t speak to you or your ‘idea’ of what a poem is doesn’t mean that it’s not a poem or that the person who wrote it isn’t a poet. One man writing about one woman doesn’t get to decide that woman is or isn’t an artist or a poet no matter how adamantly he digs in his heels. One liberal d...
MAKE FRIENDS LIKE YOU ARE A DAMN FLAMINGO
April 05, 2022 12:00 - 11 minutes - 16.4 MBHere’s the thing: A lot of us are lonely. Really lonely. And making friends? As an adult? It can feel kind of scary. Why does this matter? Well, Sherri Gordon on Very Well Mind cuts right to the chase: “Research shows that after the age of 25, most adult friendships start to dwindle.1 Of course, some of this has to do with changing jobs, getting married, moving, and even having children. “Forming meaningful relationships may be harder as you get older, but it’s well worth the effort. Goo...
No One Wants To Admit
April 04, 2022 15:00 - 2 minutes - 2.82 MBi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include: My spoken voice My raw poems. Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too! No one wants to admit that the moment they are home alone, They start singing show tunes or childhood hits, Pretending the crowds are adoring as they slide in soc...
How to Conquer The Beast Called Exposition
March 30, 2022 18:07 - 6 minutes - 9.55 MBExposition. It’s a beast. And I never have a problem with it as a writer until I’m writing middle grade fiction. This podcast we’re going to explain what exactly an agent or editor or writing coach or a teacher means when they look disdainfully down their noses at you and say, “You have too much exposition!” For the rest of the notes, check out here . . .https://carriejonesbooks.blog/podcast/how-to-conquer-the-beast-called-exposition/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spo...