Work is done for the day.

You’ve come home, eaten dinner, taken a shower, taken care of kids and pets, and now it’s time for leisure of your favorite kind: reading before the crackling fireplace on a cold night.

You light your favorite latte and hazelnut scented candles, palm your book in your hand, and turn to your marked page. The firelight plays and leaps in shadows upon your book, lighting up its figures with colors and light inside of your mind.

There’s something so picturesque about sitting down with a good thick book in your hand. It’s like settling…

Will it ever come back?

The days have gone by quickly, without many words to track them. Scattered journal entries, to-do lists and grocery lists — these are the words that littered my existence over the last month, but none of them had any hint of art or larger purpose attached.

All my life, my singular dream has been simple. I just want to write. But two years of writing for a living (freelancing my damn heart out, to be exact) has changed my love of the craft in ways that I never expected.

Part of the issue, I suppose…

Thanks so much for reading :)

Give your writing the ✨shine it needs.

Writing isn’t easy, and there are so many ways to approach it that *writing tips* has become an essay genre of its own. The overwhelming amount of information about available to teach people about writing tends to distract us from the work of actually doing it. Not only that, but everyone’s process differs, so simplistic mantras like “write every day” can only take you so far.

As a lifelong writer, I’ve picked up quite a few unconventional ways to get my ideas flowing, ones that work incredibly well for my brain and its…

During my darker times, one of my guilty pleasures is binge-watching YouTube commentary videos to distract myself from my own sad life. I can credit D’Angelo Wallace for helping me to find the genre with his incredible series on Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star. This vast array of social commentary available at my fingertips helps to distract me during my low times, even when the subject matter makes me want to vomit.

The best commentators typically include stories from the victims of sexual assault, grooming, and other creepy-but-typical behavior we see from celebrities big and small. As a storyteller myself…

Zeus reached down his fiery hand and almost touched me.

The year was 2013.

I was a junior in college and had just moved into a townhouse with two of my best friends. The house itself was a steal — $800 a month for four bedrooms, one of which went unused, only a mile or so from campus. Sure, it was in a rough neighborhood littered with an array of deep, dark potholes that caused two of my tires to pop. Sure, our next door neighbors would go on to get accused of arson and murder a few years later…

My older sister and I are five years apart in age, but we’ve always been quite close. I looked up to her immensely when I was a kid, mostly because she always had a “stick it to the man” attitude that I admired.

She took charge from a young age at deciding who she would be, becoming a pagan and getting tattoos and piercings at an age young enough to need parental signatures. She stood out from the crowd, and she made me want to do that too.

As we’ve both grown older, we’ve become our own people, molded by…

Body positivity helped me to accept myself.

“You’ll never be a model with that belly,” my dad said.

My stepmom and I were watching America’s Next Top Model, me perched on the uncomfortable computer chair while she lay supine on their oversized bed. Tyra Banks said something inane and she couldn’t help but chuckle.

At my father’s comment, something inside of me snapped. My stepmom was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met — and she was not small in any sense of the word. …