File this under self-promotion.  A non-fiction article I wrote for the very first issue of Faraway, “My Breakthrough,” is now appearing at the online literary journal Pens on Fire.  The article is about a mental leap forward that I made last year, when my writing output increased a few hundred-fold.  My secret?  You’ll have to read the article!  This is also a great site for monthly poetry and short stories from young, up-and-coming writers.

For a long time, I have known that I wanted to write. In high school I had ideas for stories that I talked about endlessly, but I never wrote a word. After graduation, I bought books on how to write books, but I never wrote a word. And in college, a few sentences occurred to me that I simply could not let escape, so I scribbled them down and put them away, but nothing ever came of them.

But last year, for some reason, I opened up a new document on my laptop computer, and I began to write. I wrote ten pages in a single sitting, and not just ten pages, but ten good pages. In a week I had written fifty pages, and I sent these out to my friends, and by the time they had read them, I had already written another fifty. I wrote almost two hundred pages of my first idea for a novel, The Altar of All, in less than two months, where in the previous five years I had written nothing. Reaching an impasse in that story, I got the idea for a second book, Sail, and in the last two months of the year, I wrote two hundred pages of that story as well . . . And in between writing these two major stories, I wrote a hundred pages of short stories.

I have since been asking myself about this remarkable output. How did I break through the writer’s block that had kept me from writing before, and suddenly produce enough to fill a book?

Read more.