One of my faithful readers, novelist Heather Justesen, is having a wonderful week full of giveaways over at her blog this week. Check it out here. Heather is the author of the newly-released, The Ball's In Her Court, and she's got another book coming out this summer. Gotta love that. Here's a brief summary that […]
A ritual from an energy-healing technique that shall remain nameless ends thusly: it is done, it is done, it is done. This is meant to be the signal that the healing has taken place. But today I am co-opting it to announce that the novel is done. Finished, finito, fini, DONE. I can hardly believe […]
When my kids were little, it seemed like every other week there was a social event I didn't want to attend. I'm a pretty social person (all these hours I spend alone writing need some balance) but sometimes there were things I just didn't want to do–school parties where all the mothers seemed far more […]
Having some difficulty creating full, true-to-life fictional characters? Why not let Marcel help you? Yes, that Marcel, the most famous one of all–Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, the only part of which I remember is when he waxed poetic about Madeleines, the shell-shaped, mini-cakes that melt in your mouth. Thanks to the […]
I've been a bit distracted lately, which has caused me to Not Write. First of all, it is hot. Not like 90-degree hot. Oh, no, that's not good enough for us. We are suffering through 106+ weather, which is hot, hot, hot. It is so hot that we poor Portlanders don't know what to do […]
The Sinner's Guide to Confession By Phyllis Schieber Today I have the pleasure of hosting a blog stop on Phyllis Schieber's virtual book tour. Wouldn't it be refreshing for an author to pay attention to women of a certain age (especially if you are a woman of a certain age)? Well, Phyllis Schieber has!Her novel […]
I just found mine. It wasn't really lost, in the sense that it was something I desperately missed. It was more like it was buried under the multitude of interests and ideas that crowd my sometimes-mushy brain (too much going on in there!) It wasn't even something that I felt I needed. The experts, however, […]
It is New Year's Eve, 2008, the cusp of a new year. I'm a wildly optimistic person and every year I proclaim that the next year is going to be the best yet. And, nearly everyone of them turns out to be best in some arena. It may be very difficult for some people to […]
"Imagination is sacred and divine–I trust it implicitly." So said Andre Dubus III at his Wordstock reading last weekend. Dubus, best known for House of Sand and Fog, read from his latest novel, The Garden of Last Days, which was inspired by the Florida sojourns of the 9-11 hijackers. After he read from the book, […]
I'm not going to do Nanowrimo this year, because I need to focus on the final rewrite (yeah, right, how many times have I said that) of my current novel. But I'm a huge fan of it and had a blast doing it several years ago, when I "won" by the way. (In case you […]
