Hello, Story Empire Readers. Joan here today. For those who live in the United States, I hope you had a fun-filled July 4th celebration.

Today, I’m going to talk about continuing education. Doesn’t exactly sound like fun, but bear with me. My daytime job is in the field of healthcare. Nurses, physicians, lab techs, even coders must have a certain number of continuing education units in order to renew their licenses each year.

As writers, continuing education isn’t required, but I believe we should strive to become better with each article, short-story, or novel we pen. There are a number of ways we can do this, the first of which is “just write.” The more we write, the more the edit, the more we refine, the better our writing will become.

Another way is to read and follow blogs such as Story Empire (Wink, wink.) There are a number of…