Jeff O'Handley

The Doubting Writer Finds His Voice

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

When I started this blog all the way back in…holy crap, 2011? Really? Anyway, when I started this blog back in 2011, it seemed like you couldn’t swing a dead cat around without running into a blogfest, a bloghop, or some kind of “award.” Liebsters. First lines. Sad songs. First loves. Remember these things? Someone […]

Time for…

Yesterday morning, I spent a couple of hours drafting a couple of ideas for a post to run today. They weren’t quite complete posts, though, because they never are. Even when I really, really work at pre-writing a post, when I sit down on Monday morning to get it done here on the blog, it’s […]

Bună zuia!

Earlier this week, I opened up my blogger dashboard and found this: This, of course, is how I reacted: Of course, I’ll admit I’ve just been looking for an excuse to put Stevie back up here, but it was pretty much my honest reaction. When I dug a little deeper into those stats, I found […]

Hannibal Says

“Quid pro quo, Clarice–comment on my blog, I’ll comment on yours.” Doesn’t social media feel this way sometimes? Someone has just left a comment on your blog; a new person has just signed on as a follower–what next? Well, the way a lot of people see it, you should just jump on over to their […]

Stepping Back

After a rough week on the writing front, I managed to squeak out a few hundred words on Saturday followed by two good sessions Sunday which added about 3000 words to my current project. And, even better, I feel like those were 3000 pretty good words that add to my story. Yay. NaNo’s handy little […]

Monday Musing

Thus ends Hell Week, with a three-hour car ride ahead of me to visit folks we haven’t seen in some time, which will be nice, except for the expected rain. When I return, the crowds that packed the area for the baseball Hall of Fame’s induction weekend should have subsided–it was pretty crazy, let me […]

Break Time

I’m feeling pretty empty where the blog is concerned right now. The ideas are either not there, or not converting well from thought to post. Rather than flail away, I’ll walk away, for now. You know what this means–I’m sure to find a bunch of things to post about in the next few weeks. I’ll […]

No Regrets

NOTE: This post is actually not about EBP’s upcoming anthology, Winter Regrets, which is due out on 2/28, details forthcoming. I don’t follow everyone who follows me, nor do I automatically track commenters back to their own blogs to comment on their posts. “Follow me, I’ll follow you” is a song title (bastardized, I’ll admit), […]

Do You Or Don’t You?

Conventional wisdom holds that agent-hunting writers should stalk agents on Facebook, Twitter, blogs–whatever social media watering holes agents gather at (yeah, that doesn’t sound at all creepy, does it?). There’s a good reason for this: agency websites are often not updated a whole lot beyond major personnel changes and latest client releases, whereas an agent’s […]

Didn’t I Write This Already?

The problem with being a writer like me is that, upon re-reading my manuscripts, I find places where I repeat myself. A character may make a statement in chapter 1, and then she makes the same statement in chapter 5. I suspect this happens because my little old subconscious thinks this statement is really important. […]