Author Dana Lockhart

I’m getting more and more serious about making writing my full time career, so I’m taking anything and everything that will help me achieve that dream. Which leads to three big announcements: I am now a writer/game reviewer for SipReadRepeat I was accepted into the  Medium  publication “ Curiosity Never Killed the Writer ” I was officially voted in as the president of the Hannibal Writers Guild this month My Growing Professional Gamer Status It was all well and good writing gaming articles for exposure with DVS . I really didn’t mind at all. I got a load of worthwhile experience and I came out the other end feeling like I got significantly better at writing journalism. I went from every article I wrote having problems - passive voice, high  Flesch-Kincaid reading scores (meaning my writing was too complicated), not enough transitions - to almost every first draft being in the green light with all these things. My writing was trained over time to be better just with simpl...

National Novel Writing Month. It is both the bane of writers and the savior. Write the rough draft of a novel in one month, they said. It’s 100% possible, they said. It will be fun, they said. I don’t know who they are, but they’re a totally different type of person than I am. After four years of participating, I’ve never won a single year of NaNoWriMo yet. And I’m perfectly okay with that. Sure, NaNo might have all these rules and expectations, but in the end, it’s your goals that matter, not theirs. When Is the Best Time to Write? Write now! My goal for NaNoWriMo has always just been to write. Almost always, NaNo has been my excuse to either finish a story I was already working on, or at least make a big dent in it. If I’d been unable to get a word down for months, November became the dedicated month to get over that. Sure, I kept that 50k finish line in mind, too, but it was never my actual goal. NaNo and me, we don’t mix very well. The arguably biggest rule of NaNoWriMo is to neve...