Jo-Anne Richard’s blog

Our Author Q and A series celebrates All About Writing community members. We hope this blog will help motivate you to get to the finish line, offer support to the authors (please buy their [...]

Don’t feel guilty for focusing on your creative needs – your life may depend upon it My mother was raised a Calvinist, so I was taught that time taken for myself was indulgent, a selfish waste of [...]

I love being able to do this – it’s like offering you a magic carpet, and transforming you into a Venetian writer, practising your craft in a 16th century palazzo. Now in its eighth year, our [...]

There’s a flat, yellow rock I swim out into the ocean to touch each day. It’s where I acknowledge what I have, give thanks … and beg favours of the creative muses. I’ve always been a bit [...]

How did we get to December? Surely it was only last week that the other Joanne (Hichens) and I were swimming at sunrise beneath the towering cliffs of the Tradouw Valley. And warming up over a [...]

I wasn’t looking forward to Venice. I know – sacrilege, right? I wondered at myself. What did it say about me? Did it mean I was tired of life, as Samuel Johnson once said of London? But on our [...]

Holidays should present you with time to do exactly what you please and concentrate on yourself, but they seldom do.   Writing holidays are different. These provide a time out of time for you [...]

Holidays should present you with time to do exactly what you please and concentrate on yourself, but they seldom do.   Writing holidays are different. These provide a time out of time for you [...]

There’s often a fine balance between writing and procrastinating, particularly at the start of a writing project. I know many of you are thinking of starting a serious writing project this year. [...]

“Watching birds takes you out of yourself. It’s a flow state. Writing ideas come in sideways during such states. So perhaps it is a form of meditation.” That’s Margaret Atwood’s form of embracing [...]

My mother didn’t allow us to use the word “bored”. She said there was always something to do, or think about. We could read, climb a tree, watch insects or simply sit thinking and day-dreaming. [...]

Don’t panic. That’s the theme for the New Year. There was too much of that last year and it wasn’t productive. I hope that, this year, you’ve cast aside unattainable resolutions in favour of an [...]