The Bend is my quarterly newsletter for creative content makers. The first issue features an article on writing a manuscript draft in three months, an interview with perfumer Justine Diamond of Elspeth’s Airs, a book review of Artpreneur: The Step-by-Step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living from Your Creativity, tech tips, and true tales of using ChatGPT. Plus Sweet Pea the blind cat weighs in on today’s issues.

When writing from the third-person perspective, you might tend to bloat your sentences with filter words such as see, think, wondered, and heard. These filter words put a subconscious distance between the reader and your work. Remove them, and the reader experiences the story from inside your character’s head, instead of having an external narrator report it to them.

The Bend is my quarterly newsletter for creative content makers. The first issue features an article on writing a manuscript draft in three months, an interview with perfumer Justine Diamond of Elspeth’s Airs, a book review of Artpreneur: The Step-by-Step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living from Your Creativity, tech tips, and true tales of using ChatGPT. Plus Sweet Pea the blind cat weighs in on today’s issues.

Stephen King’s On Writing is half-memoir and half-instructional, and one of the first books I recommend to anyone seeking writing advice. King describes how he writes a first draft in three months—what he calls a season. I’m a writer with a full-time life and job and brushed the thought aside, that I could pull off a draft in such a short amount of time.