A while back, I posted an essay to a Facebook group of women writers that I’m in. In a nutshell, this essay is about me — while I was living in Hanoi — dating a much younger Vietnamese man for 10 months, who turned out to be a covert narcissist. He almost killed me. You would think that the comments about my essay would centre around the cycle of narcissistic abuse, or trauma bonds or intermittent reinforcement. Or how a smart, educated woman like myself could be drawn in by manipulation and lies. How I was gaslighted and controlled. Or why leaving emotionally abusive
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This is the 11th essay in the #26essays2017 challenge that I’ve set for myself this year. I’m doing this because I’m the first to admit I’ve become a lazy writer: allowing guest posts and series and cross-posting to make up the bulk of content on The Diane Lee Project across 2016. The brave, fearless writing that readers admired and respected me for has all but disappeared. This year—2017—will be different. I’m reclaiming my voice—my write like a motherfucker voice! Opportunity (noun) – a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do anything. A few weeks back, I wrote about opportunity in Australia… and how
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When I started The Secret Lives of Writers series, I was approached by Alex Kourvo from Writing Slices (check the comments at the bottom of this post) to see if I’d submit it for a book review. Of course, I was overjoyed that someone was keen to review it, and I submitted it when it was ready—with very little thought, I might add! A month or so later, I was duly advised by Alex that her review of The Secret Lives of Writers would be negative. She gave me the option of not going ahead with the review (she said she had a soft
Continue reading...Writers write about creative writing Regular readers will know that over the last 18 months—yes, it’s been that long since it started!—I’ve been running a series by writers, for writers, on their approach to creative writing, with a special focus on how they fit writing into their busy lives. I am super pleased to announce that The Secret Lives of Writers is now available in the Amazon Kindle store, Kobo, Nook and and iBooks. You can grab your copy from the Delicious Publishing Book Store. So who is this book about writing for? If you are interested in creative writing, or dabble in
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Fuck It Right Off. After a year of wandering around in a work desert, with a brief respite in only one or two oases, I’m checking out. And by checking out, I mean checking in. For the last three months, I’ve been back in a marketing communications role. Finally, after close to nine months, I thought I’d found my home. That I could relax. Nothing could be further from the truth. After working my butt off for the last three months, putting my hand up to help out my immediate team (who by the way, are wonderful and I respect
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Photo via Visual Hunt. Used with permission. Someone asked me recently, knowing that I was a writer and knowing I wrote mostly non-fiction and knowing that I often wrote about difficult things, whether I wrote for healing. As in, was writing a cathartic way of lancing a few boils? I responded in the negative. And it got me thinking. Why do I write? Hell, why does anyone write? It’s not like I have a huge audience of a gazillion people champing at the bit to digest every word I write. It’s not for money, because I don’t earn a living from
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Sunday Best is a curated list of articles I’ve read over the past week or so that I find enlightening, educational or just plain interesting. This week’s focus is on writing and publishing, which is always of huge interest to me. Enjoy! What’s next with your NaNoWriMo project? The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to bang out 50,000 words across November. Quality doesn’t matter so much as quantity. So now you’ve got this… thing… that may or may not be a novel, or the start of a novel. What on earth do you do with it? Luckily, Joanna Penn has an
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Laura Roberts writes about sex, travel, writing, and ninjas—though not necessarily in that order. As the author of the “V for Vixen” sex column, Laura began her career chronicling Montrealers’ sexcapades, which are collected together in her book of essays, The Vixen Files. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, she’s also penned Confessions of a 3-Day Novelist, Ninjas of the 512, parts one and two of her serial novel, Naked Montreal, and a wide assortment of erotic Quickies. Laura is also the founding editor of the literary magazine Black Heart, and can leg-press an average-sized sumo wrestler while sipping her
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I stumbled onto an interesting article on Salon recently. The premise of the article was that wealth (either family inherited, or married into it) enables the careers of quite a few writers, and that many of these writers don’t acknowledge the fact that they are privileged. They can just write without the need to worry about pesky, inconvenient things like jobs and mortgages and bills interrupting their flow. You know: the real life stuff that gets in the way of us doing the things we love to do. I pondered this for quite a while and I thought it would be
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I wrote the first part of this post back in March 2014. Thought it was about time I finished it off! My career has been an endless succession of ultimately unsatisfying jobs In the late 1980s, I left a series of bank jobs and temporary employment, and got myself university edumacated at the ripe old age of 26, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. I wanted more from life than just temping and working in banks and bought into the hype believed that a university education would help me embark on a fulfilling and productive Career (note the capital “c”).
Continue reading...I wanted to give you all an update of where I’m up to with Love & Other Stuff. It’s been a fascinating project to work on and I’m glad I made the decision to go ahead with the book. I will be more or less able to stick to my revised publication time frame of February 2015, barring unforeseen circumstances, of course. It’s been relatively straightforward to convert this blog to a book, and I would urge anyone who has been blogging for a while to consider publication. It’s also been enjoyable rereading old posts (the book spans the years 2006 up to the end
Continue reading...A couple of weeks ago I posted about my failed attempt to participate in NaNoWriMo and how I decided to become a NaNoRebel and do NaBloPoMo instead. Given that we are more than half way through November, I thought I would give you an update as to how I’ve fared and what I’ve learned so far. Because I had specific goal in mind when I did my about-face, I’m pleased to report that this exercise has been very successful. You can read all the stuff I’ve been writing over at Delicious Scribblings. I’ve gotten back into the habit of writing
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