An international film star looking for inspiration, a young girl whose village is ravaged by AIDS, a 40-year-old ox living out his last days in the Korean countryside--these are just a few of the characters I found...
Favorite Films, 2015
1 day ago
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
Favorite Reads, 2015
I really enjoy the process of looking over the past year’s
reads, especially when I have the chance to pass on something that perhaps
evaded your radar. In 2015, I read a total of seventy books, which is a high number for...
Thursday, December 3, 2015
My NaNoWriMo Results: Deadlines, Diversions and Determination
Somebody needs to tell the NaNoWriMo organizers that
Thanksgiving week is in November. Do they know that? Children are home
from school and food must be cooked and/or ordered, eaten, packed up, unpacked
and eaten again. There’s...
Monday, November 9, 2015
NaNoWriMo First Week: Observations
Lots of writers are participating in the National Novel
Writing Month this November (NaNoWriMo for short). It’s the second time I’ve
done it; the first was in 2013, when I was finishing another novel that had
been progressing,...
Monday, October 26, 2015
The Thing About Carson McCullers
So I’ve been thinking about Carson McCullers, as I do from
time to time. I’d be interested to take a poll of writers working in the United
States today, and ask if they’d been influenced by the work of this
insightful...
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
My Love/Hate Relationship with Writing Guides Continues
How are you with museums? Avoid them? Love them? I happen to
love the idea of museums very much, and I do enjoy going to them and wish I
went more often. But I have a definite time limit where they’re concerned.
Maybe an hour-and-half...
Monday, September 14, 2015
White Space
Remember that Bob Seger classic, Against the Wind?
It’s all about youth and “living to run and running to live,” existing in the moment,
not worrying about paying or how much you owe, “breaking all of the rules that
would...
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Editing: Time Travel, Telekinesis and Leaning
I’ve been editing something this week. Not a close, line by
line edit; I’ve already done that to this particular thing recently. This was the kind of edit where you
try to step back and see it as a whole....
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Author Don't Preach: Making Characters, Not Messages
As the mother of four teenagers, I can tell you that one
thing they really enjoy is when you sit them down for a lecture on an abstract
concept. Like responsibility. Or the importance of work ethic, or something
like...
Monday, August 17, 2015
Readings: Shirley Jackson on Memory, Fans and Garlic
Earlier this month, Random House released a collection of previously unpublished work by Shirley Jackson. It's called Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings and I eagerly anticipate the arrival of my copy...
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Colorshare, Times Three
I love color. It's the first thing I think about
whenever we move to a new home (I wrote about that here),
and I tend to think about colors in terms of moods, textures and smells, and to have
strong feelings about...
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
New Look, New Direction (sort of...)
Change is natural. Change is good. Change is what happens
when you’re making other plans—is that it? When I was a kid, I used to
rearrange my bedroom a lot. I liked the fresh perspective it gave me, a way of
being a new you in the same place. So. You may have noticed this blog’s new
clean and stream-lined look. I started...
Friday, July 10, 2015
Poem for the Weekend: Robert Creeley
I've been away on vacation and so, did not have a poem prepared for this week. I decided to Google one, maybe something about summer, but noticed that the first thing that popped up when I typed the single word, "poems"...
