Here’s where to find more of the stuff you like — About Me About Me — Ilana Lydia What are some curious facts about Ilana Lydia?medium.com Books and Reading Romance: The Bleeped Upon Genre No One Respects Or, in defence of Twilightmedium.com What Brave and Defiant Character Defines Your Story? From Valentine Michael Smith to River Song, your choices are manymedium.com Why Being Called Human Is a Compliment, Against All Odds Why some sci-fi got it wrong.medium.com

What my time away from Medium has shown me — When I came on Medium about a year and a half ago, I was looking for three things: To express my thoughts coherently in a public forum. To make friends with like-minded individuals, as well as people different from me. A little cash wouldn’t hurt. I can say I have…

It’s all fun and games until the lights go out — I’d change a lot of things, if I had to do it over. But you can learn from my mistakes. I just got a double mastectomy, and am recovering as we speak. I did a lot of stuff wrong. Not just ineptly, but like a bumbling, mumbling fool. “Don’t Do…

Are we all just killers-in-waiting? — If you’re like the majority of Americans, you find serial killers fascinating rather than deplorable. Once just the domain of True Crime, the absolute take over of serial killers in our entertainment, fiction and non-fiction, can’t be denied. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal ran an article by Kevin D…

How to tell if you have a lot to gain from the mentor/mentee relationship. — Not all of us have gone for Jedi training on Dagoba, but most of us have been lucky enough to work with someone more experienced in our field who could help us traverse the challenges of the job. Blind to the mentors around me For a long time, I never realized I had had mentors. I…

And what of people who don’t? — If you do the same action again and again with no results, this is both useless and insane. Your assessment of the facts isn’t lining up with reality. And yet, all of us do it. Consider self-judgments “I’m so stupid.” “I can’t do anything right.” “I’ll never get this done on time.” …

Because you shouldn’t be idle when you’re marooned on a desert island — For a no-nonsense list of seven books that your teachers would be proud of, you might try this article by Simon Dillon: Seven Books I’d Take to a Desert Island: The Dillon Empire Edition After a truly excruciating selection process, here are my literary essentials.medium.com For a list that’s much too silly, read on. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” by Douglas Adams (I’d take all five books and the short, since…

Quit hitting the snooze button and pull up a chair — . . . or a mat, or a standing desk . . . Hello, and welcome to the reminder that you keep putting off. Check-in time! How are you doing? Really? It’s not that I don’t believe you, but I think most of us say, “fine” or “okay” out of…

A vexing problem in today’s day and age — Except for, perhaps, very slow, methodical, and diligent thinkers, most people have problems with concentration now and then. Our culture encourages it. In the digital age, information comes at us from all directions and nearly at the speed of light. I remember hearing one student describe this experience as “flipping…