Jeff O'Handley

The Doubting Writer Finds His Voice

Who Is This For?

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I was having trouble with my computer. Well, I’ve actually been having trouble with it for a couple of years, due to a damaged hard drive that, for some time, would cause complete system crashes–a rather inconvenient thing, to say the least. Those problems seemed to […]

Triggers, Again

While I was on my break, triggers and trigger warnings popped rather suddenly into prominence again. Triggered by a post Porter Anderson wrote for Writer Unboxed in mid-August, I started drafting my own bit on this, which, of course, I’ve already done at least once before (Tipper Stickers). The initial work I did on the […]

Whoa, What Is This Place?

It’s September and my self-imposed blog break is over. I return a bit refreshed and even have enough ideas sketched out to get me through a month of this–the question is whether or not I’ll do enough pre-writing on these would-be future posts to make it not too much of a struggle or not. I’m […]

And it’s Break Time

As the title says. Lately, I’ve been arriving to blog work late and unprepared–more unprepared than usual, that is. When I’m on a roll, I’ve at least thought about my posts ahead of time. When I’m really on a roll, I’ve put some ideas down on virtual paper. When I start writing about visits from […]

Monday Musing: Mauritius!

First things first: Agent Carrie is running her monthly Query Critique today–with bonus 1st page–so if you want to see what an agent thinks of a submitted query and first page, and if you want to help a fellow author potentially win a critique of her first hundred pages, hie on over to Carrie’s blog […]

Things My Characters Can’t Do

Good morning, all. A day late this week. I woke yesterday and started writing the post that was rattling around in my head all weekend, but I ran out of time. Figured I’d take care of it when I came home from work, as I have done on other occasions. That didn’t work, either. I’ve […]

Monday Musing: Clunky Computer Edition

This is one of those mornings where my computer is wheezy and sluggish and unresponsive. It gets like this once in a while, where it takes forever to switch between tabs, and heaven forbid if I try to close a tab or a window or anything like that. It’s times like these when I make […]

The Reading List (Part Deux)

I’ve been on a bit of a downer lately, what with posts on…well, never mind, no need to bring it all back up. If you’ve been reading along, you know what I mean, and if not, you can easily go back and look over the last couple of weeks of posts and see for yourself. […]

Thoughts on the Brexit

The Brexit frightens me. (In the unlikely event you have no idea what “Brexit” is, it’s the decision made by the United Kingdom last week to leave the European Union.) What frightens me about the Brexit is not what it does to the stock market, or global trade, the value of the dollar compared to […]

Solstice (and not much else)

Happy Solstice! At least in my particular corner of the world, the sun reaches its zenith, i.e., its greatest distance from the equator, today at 6:34 p.m. In terms of daylight, we’ll have 15 hours, 19 minutes, 33 seconds of it today. Woohoo! I am once again back on submission. My manuscript is in Carrie’s […]