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Your New Best Friend:
The Deadline Calendar

GO ON, TRY my interactive calendar of emotional high holy days, regular-version high holy days and more. It’s probably my number one memoir writing tip, since writing on deadline, or to a deadline, is one of the single best ways to learn how to write memoir.

Hover your cursor over a cinnamon-colored date to see what pops up. Use it to start personal essays, radio pieces and op-eds to submit on deadline. How? Look three months out for radio ideas; six to twelve for magazine pieces. Pluck something from the calendar and start now to submit the very best work you can produce.

Here is how to stop using writing prompts and writing exercises, those time-wasting devices leave you merely practicing writing. You want to write with intent, and you want to succeed. So start today and do so.

Write with intent: Pick a date, write to it, submit the piece. Read and react. You’re a writer. That’s what writers do. So write on.

October 2024

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	1 October, 1 2024 The First Day of the Month October was the 8th month in the ancient Roman calendar. When the calendar was revised it retained its name in spite of several efforts to change it. There was a month named for Julius Caesar and one for Augustus, and soon the eighth month went on a veritable bender of renaming, being called Germanicus, for a distinguished general; Antoninus, in honor of an emperor; Faustinus, in honor of Faustina, wife of Antoninus; and then Hercules, in honor of the emperor Commodus, who called himself the Roman Hercules and insisted he be worshipped as a god. Oh, those Romans. Finally, good sense prevailed, and we went back to the original name — or was that sensible, since this was the name for the 8th month of the year? Oh my. You be the judge.	2	3	4	5	6
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