The Goodjelly Blog
By Christine Carron
How can I make it easy? This question is my current obsession in relation to my writing—both novels and blog posts. And since I also love pie, I'm going for full clichĂ© easy-as-pie easy.Â
Years ago, I read a book by Marshall Goldsmith called What Got You Here, Won’t Get You The...
By Christine Carron
When I was in grade school, I was a member of the Saint Louis Civic Ballet. Stanley Herbert was the company's maestro. I learned so much from Mr. Herbert about discipline, technique, and art. He was also quite a character. A vivid memory is of him sitting in his regular spot on ...
By Christine Carron
One of the most profound lessons I integrated from my years of dance training was to finish well. At its core, this directive is a guard against performance meltdowns in situations where a dancer flubs or forgets the steps, or worse, falls. It calls you to pick yourself up, keep...
By Christine Carron
Which is more memorable? A girl in a beautiful pink prom dress or a girl in a beautiful pink prom dress wearing sky blue sneakers? Blue sneaker girl wins in my book every time.
A girl in a pink prom dress is expected. A girl in a pink prom dress wearing sky blue sneakers . . ....
By Christine Carron
I am not much of a gambler. Once I was in Las Vegas on a business trip and went with some colleagues to play blackjack. I giddily explained my novice status to our dealer, a white woman so brown and wizened it looked like she spent every non-working, waking hour in the sun, slep...
By Christine Carron
There was a weeping willow tree in the backyard of the house where I spent my youngest childhood years. I have a particular memory of climbing it. Higher and higher I went until I was clinging to the central leader at the very top of that willow. I inchwormed myself up just one ...
By Christine Carron
In writing, as with anything we do, there’s the desired output and the process we go through to achieve the desired output. Let’s say the desired output is a commercially successful novel, i.e., we want to earn some scratch (gasp!) for our artistic labor. Now, for most of us whe...
By Christine Carron
In The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath explore why certain brief experiences jolt us, even transform us—and how we can learn to create such elevated moments in our life and work.Â
We writers, of course, endea...
By Christine Carron
Bee space. A distance of three-eighths of an inch, and the amount of space honeybees will leave open in a hive. More than that and they span it with honeycomb. Less than that and they plug the empty space with propolis. It’s sort of like the bee equivalent of Goldilocks’ just ri...
By Christine Carron
Continuing our Whole Brain Thinking series, today we will explore one of the most powerful applications of the model: helping you to situationally shift into less preferred modes of thinking, i.e., helping you do things that you don’t like doing. An application which may leave y...
By Christine Carron
In a time long ago at Saint Pius X High School in Festus, Missouri, once you hit sophomore year, you got Mr. Janc for English. Calm and spare in body, kind and spare in temperament. That’s how I remember Mr. Janc.
One day, he assigned us the classic and classically boring How-T...
By Christine Carron
Imagine the following:
Reaction of the other group members: Horrified.
