Hint: He wasn’t drinking a $10 Latte Macchiato at Starbucks. — Before I start, let me ask you something: What do you need to put your words down on paper? What are the conditions you need to fulfill before you can say, “All right, it’s time to write”? Perhaps you can only write on a specific app like Scrivener, Microsoft Word…

(Warning: contains strong language and depictions of physical violence.) The show starts when time stops. The children stare at my purple costume, frozen in their places as I walk around. I’m the only one moving in the entire birthday party; everything and everyone else is as static as a picture…

Hint: I wrote about something I do know. — While some fellow Medium bloggers claim to maintain a curation rate – the rate of one’s posts that get distributed in topics – of around 75%, it is a different story for many of us. None of my first twenty, thirty stories got curated. Not distributed in topics was the…

And how you can do it too. — Even though we are (finally) reaching the end of the catastrophic year that is 2020, there is something I want to tell you about 2019. Yes, 2019, or 1 b.C. (before Corona). I have never read so many books in a year as I did in 2019. I fell one…

Read this if you want to contribute to the publication. — So you want to write for The Indie Writer. That’s great — and it would be a pleasure to have you as a contributor. Please read the following Q & A to see whether you are a good fit: Who can contribute to The Indie Writer? Anyone with a background…

No, not even Hemingway did it. — I just hate it that creative writing — just like other forms of expression — is often misunderstood as the stuff of troubled geniuses. You have probably come came across people who had this mindset. People who regard themselves as the crème de la crème of artistic sentimentalism, affirming that…

Or: How to Launch a Book Like an Amateur in 5 Unprofessional Steps — I have been there. I dreamed of being one of those many indie authors who “made it” — people who can boast about their hundreds of fans, their five-figure paychecks, and the wide recognition of their work. In my first attempt, however, I did exactly what they don’t do. I…

Even if you don’t have time — and we both know you have. — I don’t think lack of time exists. Time is our most abundant and most precious resource. We have a lot of it — enough to waste it with pointless activities that bring no positive outcome. Those hours scrolling down our feeds on Instagram and Twitter, for instance. But time management…

After so many books read in this period, these are the words that touched me the most. — When I first bought a Kindle, one of its functions promptly caught my attention. It is pretty mainstream nowadays, but it was groundbreaking for a person used to old-school reading. It was highlighting. Yes — the same thing we do here on Medium. You read a passage that for some…