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This is a difficult thing for me to write, but I think putting it down on virtual paper will help.  There are loads of blogs and books and magazine articles out there that give writing advice, and the main point comes down to one thing - as Chuck Wendig so eloquently put it,  shut up and write . It's not bad advice - a writer writes, after all, and nothing gets written if someone doesn't sit down (or lie down, or stand up - however you feel comfortable) and write it.  I understand it completely, and it's certainly something I've tried to cleave to since I've decided that being a writer was more important to me than whining about wanting to be a writer.  However, that doesn't mean I write every day, and I know there are a lot of people in a similar situation to mine. In order to write, you have to be able to hold a pen or pencil, or type, or dictate, or in some other way cause words to bleed onto a page (whether digital or physical).  The act of bleeding word

Speaking with my husband earlier today, I remembered one of the very first things he told me about role-playing games.  "Never touch another player's dice unless they give you permission," he had stated very seriously.  I remember smiling a little bit, but I took it to heart, figuring it was tied to gamer etiquette.  It is, in a way - many gamers feel that having someone else touch their dice might change the dice's luck. There are loads of other superstitions related to anything randomly determined, which makes sense in a way.  People in general will look for patterns and for anything that might cause randomness to work in their favor.  My mother played Bingo for a long time, and I went with her to the Bingo parlor and saw that some of these ladies would nearly come to blows if someone was sitting in "their" seat.  I saw a woman around the age of my grandmother who had about a dozen stuffed animals that she would line up in a particular order in front of

Apologies for the late post - it's been a very busy weekend.  My 12-year-old niece has been visiting this weekend, and I took her to  GeekGirlCon , which was her very first convention. My niece is just starting to come into her own as a self-identifying geek, and she's not that aware of what kind of community is available to her.  She's begun to play video games, and she's started to spend time online with other gamers.  At the same time, she's living in an area that doesn't have the biggest geek community, and she's never spent much time in a face-to-face situation with other people who share her interests. The first thing she did was hurt herself, of course.  After that, though, she started to get excited about seeing other people like her, and people that didn't make her feel like she "stood out".  By the end of the convention, she said that she felt comfortable, and like she was with people who were like her.  It was one of the best exp

It's been a rough few weeks in the writing world of the Stephie, and I think I can say that I've been blocked.  Now, I know that there are a ton of well-respected authors out there who say that writer's block is a myth, it doesn't exist, it's just an excuse for writers not to write.  It's all probably true, but that doesn't make the terror of the blank page that much easier.  For me, it means that I now feel guilty for not being able to get the words out, as well as frustrated.  Guilt combined with frustration is usually a good way to make sure I don't make any progress. I'm trying to work my way through it, which is significantly easier said than done, obviously.  I'm essentially using this blog post as a way to force some words onto a page, and hope that it'll get the words flowing a little more easily.  Considering it took about half an hour to write the last two paragraphs, I'm less than convinced that this is working. The latest