The Writing Life
The Strange Thing About Writing
Do you ever have weeks where a bunch of little things go wrong and somehow, it feels overwhelmingly distracting and frustrating? Well, I had one of those weeks recently. My PayPal account was hacked, and suddenly, I was sending out hundreds of invoices for hundreds of dollars to folks I’d never heard of. It took…
Read MoreWriting Just Because…
For the past two years, I’ve been working with a gifted teenager on her writing at the Louisville Academy of Fine Arts. She’s currently writing a novel, and the quality of her work excites me. Our weekly sessions include reviewing her pages, as well as discussing craft articles and talking about writing-related challenges. I often…
Read MoreMore Reflections on Missing Mom
Along with every other author on the planet, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is: “Where do you get your ideas?” For me, it’s often something that I’ve directly experienced or observed that’s left a lasting impression on me. For example, when I was in high school, a friend and I attended…
Read MoreReflections on MISSING MOM
My young adult novel, MISSING MOM, comes out in January of next year, and pre-orders will be available this coming fall. I’m getting excited! Here’s a brief description: Devastated by her mom’s sudden disappearance and the evidence pointing to suicide, seventeen-year-old Noelle, an aspiring ballet dancer, doesn’t believe her mom would ever have taken her…
Read MoreWriters Can Escape Into Fiction, Too
Many years ago, when I was going through a painful divorce, books became my lifeline. Especially on the weekends when my little boy was visiting his dad, I’d bring home a pile of books from the library and lose myself in a novel (or two) to stave off my sadness and my loneliness. It was…
Read MoreYou Can Never Tell
All signs pointed to a disastrous performance for the community chorus I sing with at the rehearsal yesterday morning. The director stopped us mid-song several times, furious that we were still making mistakes she deemed unacceptable. “I’m right on the edge, people,” she told us. She wasn’t kidding. Meantime, the accompanist wasn’t feeling well, and…
Read MoreChoices
On my Guppies’ Sisters in Crime listserve, there’s been an interesting discussion about career choices, especially when it comes to choosing paths to publication. One of our members, Judy Penz Sheluk, has written a wonderful book on this subject, FINDING YOUR PATH TO PUBLICATION: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE. Choices include: finding an agent and shooting for…
Read MoreSometimes Our Writer Friends Know Just What to Say
My writer’s group was discussing Ruta Sepetys’s wonderful book, YOU The Story, A Writer’s Guide to Craft Through Memory. Sepetys advises writers to use our own backgrounds and experiences as grist for our fiction. One of the questions she suggests we pay attention to is: “What elements of your childhood self still exist in your…
Read MoreUnplugged
I’ve always been fascinated by those personal experience pieces in which folks report that their lives have been rejuvenated by the simple act of unplugging their mobile phones. The idea of replacing endless texts, emails, and Facebook messages with face-to-face interactions, not to mention eliminating interruptions while writing, is so appealing to me. The problem…
Read MoreI Never Could Have Been a Fuller Brush Salesman
Being older than dirt, I actually remember enterprising door-to-door salesmen pushing vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias. They were invariably cheerful and perseverant folks who brushed off the inevitable “no thanks” they got along the way to making a sale. All I can say is I would have made a terrible salesperson. Take the other day, for…
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