Michele Venne's Blog

It happened four years ago, and it happened again just last week. Though this summer in Arizona has been less brutal than the last few years, I still couldn’t wait for it to be over. I remember four years ago, a hurricane off the coast of Mexico blew itself out as it moved across land. Arizona got the spinoff, and it snapped the heat and humidity and gave us a fall, something that we joke happens…

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An interesting week in a string of weird weeks that make me think time is turning a page all on its own. For a few months, I haven’t been escaping into fiction. Instead, I’ve been reading books on writing. Marking interesting sentences with a sticky note, I then typing out those little nuggets. At some point, I’ll refer back to these notes. Either I’ll keep them or recycle them. In the last couple…

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I joke with myself that my superpower is delayed gratification. I would be the one kid who, fifty years later, still has both marshmallows (read about the marshmallow experiment). I’m so used to delayed (or no) gratification that when it does come around, I’m not sure how to handle it. This picture is of the table I had at Tucson Festival of Books in 2016. The last year I attended (2022)…

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For the first time in years, I’m participating in a creativity challenge. The best part is that I’m having fun 🙂 We have a prompt that we use to create something that fits on a 2×3 inch index card (this is from daisyyellow.com). My drawing ability rivals that of a seven-year-old using their non-dominant hand. The other two in the challenge are very talented artists. They paint, create graphics…

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I can’t say what happened this week, other than unscheduled time off from my creative projects. I look at my schedule and see that tasks were done each day, I met with clients, rode Holly, and ran errands. Anyone looking at that as a piece of abstract art might shrug and walk away. Upon closer inspection, it was a week of healing from a medical procedure, which required me to do everything…

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I’ve read this phrase in novels that include characters who are military or former military. It means, I think, to be aware, to pay attention. I’ve had things this week that have caught my attention. I’ve had some momentum, finally, and have made progress on the projects that aren’t related to my fiction writing. It’s a practice in accepting what is, tucking away any semblance of perfectionism…

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Time passes independently of our wants. On most nights this week, when I sat down to journal out my day (not really a diary, but a place to put thoughts and reflections), I could list what I did, but not account for what seemed like hours of the day. Some tasks were crossed off my to-do list, but not all, and the list wasn’t long. Perhaps planets have aligned, or are out of alignment…

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I’ve had tubs in the garage from my days in the classroom. For my entire career, I’ve created my own materials. When I had English classes, and we read novels, there were packets of vocabulary and comprehension questions. Grammar meant parts of speech and types of sentences. Math had me figuring out ways to practice concepts that didn’t require a worksheet. Through the years since I’ve left the…

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In the last few of days, I’ve been staring wide-eyed at the computer. Writer 4 came through, submitting all his stories and the extras needed for all the parts of the anthology. I finished the edits, put all the stories together in one document, and formatted it in Vellum. The beta reader has her copy. I complied all the parts for the cover, except the description, which I asked one of the writers…

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I spent time this week shuffling file folders and stories. With the research I’ve done the last three weeks for a couple of clients, my jotted notes had my attention turning toward a training I completed 27 years ago. It’s interesting that not much has changed in that field. As my focus swiveled from one project to the next, I took a moment to do a little reflection. Where have I had success…

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