I have a love-hate relationship with the self-help industry. Mostly, I love it. Send me an email detailing the latest way to develop more insight and I'll click on your link any day. Show me an ad promoting some kind of "You Can Achieve More With Your Life" workshop and I'll read your long sales […]
We are at the beach, my family and my sister's, hiking to Cape Falcon. "Nake," the person in the lead, my teenaged nephew calls. "Nake!" "Nake!" "Nake!" The refrain goes on down the line, through the motley assorted ten of us on this hike (the sum total of everyone on this vacation, because, as we […]
So, tomorrow is my birthday, and no I'm not going to tell you how old I am. Age has no meaning, right? Its only a number…like the number on the bathroom scale. Actually, my son the mathemetician would take issue with the phrase "only a number" because his brain dwells in the land of numbers […]
It has come to my attention that my absence from writing posts has been noticed. I was hoping I could slide under the missing blogger wire and nobody would care. And I am thrilled that such is not the case. So, an explanation is in order. Over the last couple of months, my 92-year-old mother's […]
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about creativity with a purpose. As usual, I banged the drum for writing on a regular basis. (This is a familiar subject matter for me, as attested to by these posts, too: Getting Up at 5 AM, Techniques for Writing Flow, and Ah, But Here's the Rub, to name […]
My mother's cat, Emma, came to live with us about a month ago, when it became apparent that Mom was going to be in the nursing home a good long time, like forever. Emma was as old in cat years as Mom in human years (92), if not older. By our best estimates, she was […]
A few years ago, a dear friend of my daughter's was planning her wedding and she and her fiancee asked me to become ordained so that I could perform the wedding ceremony. A quick search on the internet turned up Universal Ministries, and a quick check of Oregon's loose marriage laws confirmed that getting ordained […]
I've been on hiatus. Unlike when the television networks do this to one of their shows, this was not actually a planned break, just one of those things that happen once in awhile in the writing life. Last week I moderated a panel at AWP, and as is the case with most conferences, didn't have […]
I'm working on the final (ha!) rewrite of my novel, coming up on part two. I did a lot of thinking and making notes before I started this rewrite, which included many Great Ideas, and most of that affected part one. Why? Because it was character stuff. I worked on figuring out how characters reacted […]
John Updike has died, of lung cancer. You can read the New York Times obit here. I'm sad. I didn't even know he was ill. The obituary is one of those that has been on file for awhile and so doesn't talk a lot about the circumstances of his death. Love him or hate him, […]
