-
Solve Your Sophomore Slump
Have you ever thought you’d figured out the formula to success only to get crazy stuck right after? Mary Volmer hit that sweet spot all of us writers hope to arrive at when she published her first novel, Crown of Dust. But when it came to the second one, she hit a roadblock. Sound familiar?…
-
An Ode to Pursuit – A Happy One Year of Conzpiring
An Ode to my fellow co-Conzpirators. A year (and 51 posts) ago on the 4th of July 2014, Conzpire published its first post. I’m very proud to be in company of such amazing and determined co-Conzpirators who are in pursuit of their own personal “obsession” projects where we get to share ideas, experiences, interviews and…
-
GEEQ: Sing Your Truth 2015
It was the moment of truth: Wednesday, June 17. My GEEQ podcast teammates and I patiently waited in the atrium during our all-staff meeting to hear who had won KQED’s podcast co-opetition. Two months prior, KQED had put a call-out to staff to generate the next podcast idea. From 19 submissions, our GEEQ podcast was…
-
This Author’s Surefire Strategies for Finishing a Novel
Mary Volmer didn’t intend to become a writer, not at first. She was just a grad student studying abroad in Wales when the lures of a story hooked her. Lucky for us, it didn’t let her go. And within a few years, while she was completing her MFA in Creative Writing, that passion project turned into…
-
Turning Your Consulting Service Into a Product – A Short Five Year Plan
If you are working as a service seller and thought that selling a product might be a much better alternative than selling your time for money, then here’s a long and hard plan to get you there. While most plans focus on compressing your milestones, these shortcuts often rob you of deep domain knowledge that…
-
How to Ditch Your Goals and Still Get Ahead
Lately, we at Conzpire have been talking about FUN. We’ve been goal-oriented in the past, we’ve worked hard and we’ve passed up opportunities so that we can live purpose-driven lives. But sometimes we get so caught up in the greater meaning of things that we get stressed out, stop sleeping, forget to eat (those guys,…
-
The Creative Life: The Old Man and The Pen
In an effort to keep some of the personal projects that I’ve started from dying out, I’ve set a theme-of-the-month to help me focus. This month I will be going back to fundamentals and practice my jump shots in 3D space. It has been almost 5 months since I ended my 30-day challenge to learn…
-
Vizjhanti: Imagining Truth
“My name is Truth, a namesake that I share with you all. Formless, fluid and in constant flux. I am awareness. The interconnection between a waking star and the dreaming sea of darkness that it drifts upon. My name frames mystery. I am the vessel, and the void within. I am truth, in the form…
-
How do you break the cycle of bingeing and dieting?
This is a lifelong question for me. For two years, I joined Overeaters Anonymous thinking it would help me stop my emotional eating craziness. Here’s what I learned. For the uninitiated, OA is a twelve step group that uses the same abstinence-based approach popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous. The way a lot of OAers practice it,…
-
The 3 Buckets That Make Your Boat Sail
The year is off to a good start and ideas are flowing. Growing a consulting service from a part time side-hustle into a full time enterprise is top of mind. Next thing you know, we are midway in March and the effort can get overwhelming. And March could be your metaphor for any point in time…