Posts by Julia Schmeelk

In every profession there are those days that test your stamina. In teaching it is parent conferences, in retail it can be inventory and black Friday. For tax preparers it’s April 15. So much extra time, so much extra work, and people join together to get the big job done. Proving once again that community…

I have an amazing partnership with my husband. There are so many things we do to support one another, but one of the best is we try to find the humor in life. To that end, Shawn has been supplying me with bits of funny every day for years. Some of you have heard some…

Reading apps are cool, I can access so many new and exciting stories from all kinds of new authors. The problem of course is they can be very expensive. As a reader, I don’t mind buying books, but some of these books if you buy a chapter at a time will be over $20. And…

In my world, the NewEarth world, self-awareness is a task every youth must undertake. They must decide if they are territory dragons or clan dragons. They must discover their talents, and gain the training they need from an expert they admire. Every youth must travel, discover what kind of dragon they choose to be, how…

In my fictional world, the power lies in many places. The planet has unimaginable power, enough to share with the dragons and now the humans. But she needs them to protect herself, because while the planet has raw power there is only so much she can do, she is a planet, after all. The council…

I am in the midst of a huge moving project. My parents have passed onto the next adventure and left us a house packed with treasures, trash, and lots of history. Our task has been to sort, toss, distribute, donate, and preserve what needs it, consolidate and move out of our house so we can…

Most of the writers I know, once in the zone will work for hours on a project. They will isolate, set aside family, friends, work, and everything else and focus on a project. Now achieving that focus is never simple. It requires flipping a switch, and turning it off is no easy task either. Writers…

When you build your own world, you get to define all these very important words for your own fictional reality, but in the real world, the one where my feet live, we all have our own idea of freedom. For many it is freedom from something. Freedom from ignorance, freedom from starvation, freedom from persecution,…