Camika Hayes

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pixels It’s so difficult to believe that we’re already in 2025. Time definitely seems to go much faster as you get older. I’m not sure I’m a fan of that part, but I suppose I have little choice in how I perceive time. I shall just have to try and accomplish things and fill my time in the best ways for me. To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, some of this is going to…

It's been a while since any blog posts happened, and I wanted to give you an update if you've been following along.

Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels Hello friends! Gosh, I have missed you and missed this. I’ve been making some changes in my life, as well as working on my main project. Ultimately, I guess I’ve finally reached the point of saturation and am hopefully going to use that feeling to shove my WIP into the next phase. The world has been a little crazy, to say the least. There’s been a lot for all…

Most of us realize we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others, but that’s easier said than done. We can’t help but try to size up our skills when confronted with someone with similar skills that we admire. In some ways, this helps motivate us to work harder and improve. When we hear about someone else’s writing path, we’re often impressed and complimentary or encouraging to the other person. We…

Hope you are all having a great weekend! Don't forget to do something nice for yourselves!

Hello! I’m deviating from my traditional schedule for this post. I’m currently focusing on a few different projects, including revisions of a work in progress (WIP). I won’t be spending as much time on here, as you may have noticed, while I switch gears for a while. Now, as every master procrastinator knows, this means you may be hearing from me randomly when: I’m avoiding some particularly…

Villains deserve a little love too, so here's a list of a few of my favorites. Do you have a favorite villain, or one you really appreciate?

Villain Vibes Stories are wonderful. You can take the same information, present it in a story format, and suddenly everything makes more sense. It’s more memorable, because stories give us a way to connect. I don’t often “connect” with the villains of stories, which is probably a good thing, but I can absolutely recognize that the villain is well-done. Perhaps they’re the person you love to…

Today's Fiction Friday is out. It involves fire, so please skip it if fire scenes are a trigger. Hope you are all doing well, and ready for the weekend!

Happy Friday! I hope your week went well, and that you have a great upcoming weekend. This week’s Fiction Friday is going to be a little different. I’m not leaving it off at any special point. Instead what I did, and what you can do if you’re stumped for a writing exercise, is pick an object/item and create a backstory for it. Today’s writing will be centered around an object and it’s…

Better late than never, right? Hope your Wednesday has been fabulous!

A writer’s household is rarely boring. I’m blessed to have multiple people with writerly brains and tendencies in the same house. It’s because of this that one of my kids and I got involved in an analysis of a series on Netflix. They did most of the analysis, to be fair, but it was a great opportunity for me to think about some of the awesome points they made. There are many different ways to…

Happy Monday everybody! Is your main character a cake or pie person? Or perhaps they eschew sweets of any kind?

It’s probably fair to say that we do most of our planning, and character development centered around our main characters. It makes sense. When we’re writing a story, the character drawing the most attention and scrutiny is the main character. Most stories also have a few side characters. While the side characters don’t hold the same importance in a story as the main character, they are still an…

I spent some time thinking about the concept of focus, and the lack of focus. So I wrote a blog post about it. Hope you all have an awesome Wednesday!

You sit down to write, or to work on a to-do list. Suddenly, you’re pelted with a number of other thoughts and responsibilities. Like buzzing bees, the ideas drone, insistent on distracting you. Does this sound familiar? I’m sure I’m not the only one who, when faced with a number of tasks or a looming deadline, feels like the ability to focus has fled.  Now, I’m not a doctor or psychologist or…

Hope you have a great Wednesday! If you've been bogged down lately by rejections and need a new perspective on them, today's post might help a little. Also, keep going #writers! You've got this, and I know you'll achieve those goals!

Writing is a difficult pursuit. From the genesis of an idea to the process of querying, there are many hurdles along the path. It can become a struggle to receive those dreaded rejections, and pretty soon you might find yourself wondering, “why do I even bother?” or worse, “what if my writing just isn’t good enough?” It’s always a good idea to continue to practice and hone any skill you have,…

Can you tell I've been reading book reviews lately? Hope you all have a great Monday. If you're feeling down about some reviews, remember that books are art. Reviews are very subjective. #KeepWriting

For writers, book reviews are the means by which their work soars to success or plummets to the depths of oblivion. Perhaps that’s a little overly dramatic, but we all know that reviews do have an impact on how the book is received by the overall public.  Every book review is not necessarily equally important, of course. A negative review by someone famous, for instance, carries much more weight…

Happy Friday everybody! I hope your day goes well, and that you have an awesome weekend!

Welcome to another fabulous Fiction Friday! I guess I’m not sure exactly how fabulous your Friday is, but it’s Friday. Must be pretty good, at least. I hope your week went well, and that you have a wonderful weekend ahead of you. We’ve made it through another week, and we’re coming into February already. I can hardly believe that we’re already a month into 2023! Is it just me or does time seem to…

Welcome to Wednesday! We made it to the middle of the week! *celebratory dancing*

Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom If you’ve been following along with this blog, even for the past couple of weeks, you know I’ve been taking some time to go over my past blog posts so I could enter the titles into a spreadsheet. While I was doing that project, I realized a couple things: 1) I needed to keep track of a lot more than just a date and a blog title, and 2) I started blogging in 2012. Last…

I finally have a Monday blog post! lol Hope you had a great weekend, and are starting this week feeling refreshed. You've got this!

Writing is amazing, and blogging allows writers to chat about everyday things through a blog post. Blog posts can be fun, or serious; they can be informative or conversational. Sometimes blog posts are all of these things at one point or another.  If you plan to run a blog for any length of time, especially if you see yourself potentially blogging well into the future, it’s a really good idea to…

Hope everyone is excited for the weekend. Anyone have #reading plans?

Another Friday is here, how predictable. 🙂 I hope you are all happy that the weekend approaches, and that you have a wonderful book to write, or one to read. I have a list of books I want to read, but I doubt I’ll be able to get through all of the over the weekend. Since we’ve made it to another Fiction Friday, I’ll write the beginning of a story and leave it off at a point where you can…

If you're wondering about becoming a #blogger, this might help you get started on better footing. Best of luck to you, and to all the awesome #bloggers out there! Happy Wednesday! #writing

Nobody is perfect, but I took some time the past couple of weeks to go through all my previous blog posts on my main blog and enter them into a spreadsheet so I could get a better grasp of data and analyze stats that WordPress doesn’t necessarily provide with their existing free analytics. Boy, was that an interesting way to highlight my blogging mistakes! I’m really glad I decided to undertake…