We all have one.That inner voice with a clipboard and bad attitude.“You’re not good enough.”“Don’t even try, you’ll only fail.”“Other people can do that. Not you.” Writers know this voice intimately.It’s the voice that stalls your writing, undermines your confidence, and rewrites your rough draft with red pen dipped in acid. But what if I […]
If you’ve ever had a pair of characters feel a little too agreeable, a little too in sync, like they’re sipping tea from the same soul—well, congrats on writing your inner harmony. But compelling fiction doesn’t live in inner harmony. It lives in dissonance. In the magnetic push and pull of desire, fear, and reaction.
Here’s a universal truth they don’t print in the Odyssey of the Mind handbook:Something will go wrong.Possibly everything. On competition day, glitter will fall off the set.A prop will snap in half like a breadstick.Someone will forget their line—or worse, forget their pants.A glue gun will rebel. The script will vanish. Someone will suddenly realize
If readers skip anything, it’s not dialogue. They’ll skim description. They’ll hop over internal monologue. But when characters speak, readers lean in. Why? Because dialogue is where fiction breathes. It’s where characters drop their masks—sometimes deliberately, sometimes despite themselves. It’s where the interior becomes exterior. And it’s where your story’s emotional voltage gets conducted, wire
I read a lot. It’s one of the ways I try to make sense of this strange, beautiful, and often contradictory world. And not just mainstream nonfiction or practical how-tos—I read about out-of-body experiences, mystical states of consciousness, psychic phenomena, spiritual systems, esoteric philosophies. The kind of stuff many people dismiss outright, sometimes with a
After years of wading through the self-help aisle, devouring spiritual texts, and doing the work (therapy, retreats, breathwork, and journaling prompts with more emotional range than the average indie film), I’ve started to notice a troubling pattern — one that Ken Wilber, ever the cartographer of consciousness, named with clinical precision: the Pre/Trans Fallacy. It’s
If you’ve ever coached an Odyssey of the Mind team, you know the tension. You want to help. You see the answer, the shortcut, the perfect phrase, the stronger structure. And yet — you can’t touch it. You can’t say it. You can’t even raise an eyebrow in the wrong direction. Welcome to coaching without
I started my writing life as a proud pantser. Total discovery writer. I didn’t want to know what was going to happen in the story — that would have ruined the whole damn point. Writing was my way of finding out. The thrill was in the surprise, in chasing the glimmer of a moment or
I’ve read over 1,200 books on spirituality and mysticism. That’s not a flex (though it is a little bit). It’s a confession. A lifetime of searching, questioning, and tracking patterns across traditions, cultures, and centuries has brought me to a conclusion I didn’t expect when I first cracked open the Tao Te Ching or the
A practical survival guide for the wide-eyed, slightly overwhelmed, brave soul who said “sure, I’ll coach” and then immediately wondered what they just signed up for. So, you volunteered to coach an Odyssey of the Mind team. Or maybe you were “voluntold” by your kid, your school, or the mysterious gravitational pull of glitter-covered chaos.
