Jennifer Willis

For a looong time, I’ve been looking for the perfect “office away from home.” 
Every so often, I think I’ve found it even though I’ll have to compromise on one factor or another. I’ll find a place that’s nice and quiet, but it’s not within walking distance. Or there will be that coffee shop I can walk to, but it’s a generic chain or doesn’t have power outlets immediately available. Sometimes it’s the WiFi that’s unreliable, or the tea and/or food isn’t the greatest. Other times, the place simply goes out of business in this tough economy.
But now, I think I [...]

One of the reasons I love writing is that I’m never finished learning my craft. There is always room for improvement.
This should be somewhat reassuring to many writers of all stripes—at least, that was my reaction upon reading Dean Wesley Smith’s excellent blog post on the subject not too long ago—but it can also be a frustrating reality when I’m trying to slog my way through my own slush pile of first drafts.

Right now, I am still in rewrites on Iduna’s Apples, the sequel to last year’s Valhalla. Yes, I wrote the [...]

A few days after my iPad arrived, I took a free iCloud class at the Apple Store. I wasn’t all that surprised that at 42, I was the youngest person in attendance. And, unfortunately, although our teacher had announced at the beginning of the demonstration that he wouldn’t use class time to troubleshoot specific questions and problems (but that people with those concerns could meet with him afterwards or head over to the Genius Bar), he spent the majority of his time doing exactly that: helping people get their iPads and iPhones set up properly for shared calendars, hunting for [...]

We had some friends come over for Cinco de Mayo on Saturday, and as I was cleaning the house, I got to thinking about how I’ve never read anywhere—on websites or in books dedicated to home-based businesses—about the importance of good housekeeping.
I’m not talking about the routine administrative stuff like invoicing and file storage that is normally referred to as “housekeeping.” I’m talking about getting down on your knees under you desk to dust beneath power strips.
Taking out the trash and emptying the recycling can are no-brainers; even I don’t need to set up a schedule to make sure that [...]