SHAUN IS SICK! Gasp! He is never sick. But he is, so I've made the executive decision to replay/republish one of our most popular episodes from three years ago.

Ready? Let's go!

A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.

To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'

But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part of most people's lives. But we're FOCUSING on the writing aspect.

Flirting is showing someone that you are attracted to them.

If you've listened to the random thought portion of the podcast, it's obvious that Carrie fails at flirting and in knowing when other people are flirting with her.

Side note from Carrie: This is because it's really extremely rare for me to be attracted to people in that way.

So, when it comes to writing about flirting, she has to do a lot of research about how people flirt, how people react to flirting, what the common aspects of flirting are.

All of us, as writers and humans, have blind spots or flaws. These places can be viewed as writing weaknesses or human weaknesses, but they honestly just make us real.

Second side note from Carrie: Not being attracted to people that way isn't a flaw, it's just something that's different than what our society considers the 'norm.'

When we're writing, we have to look for those places where we're not as strong. It could be setting. It could be showing our character's emotions. It could be plot. It could be making a character realistically flirt. It could be making dialogue real. The secret to becoming a better writer is to dive into those places where you're not as strong, and focus on them.

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Be courageous. Go right to where your weaknesses are and excavate them. If you can't write a fight scene. Go write fight scenes. Read them. Watch them. Go into the places where your weaknesses are.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Flirting is not the same as being friendly. It's about intent.

SHOUT OUT

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

IN THE WOODS, appeared in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books . There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

ART

You can buy some of my art. I paint to help inform my stories and some of the prints are available now. There will be more soon. You can check it out here.