I am pleased to announce a new claim to fame: this site has been banned in Abu Dhabi. My husband has just returned home from working in the UAE for the better part of the last two months. Everything there is censored–TV shows, movies (which are shown with subtitles in Arabic), and websites. So when […]
My good friend and colleague, Linda Busby Parker, is starting a new press! Her first publication is going to be a Christmas anthology and she is accepting both fiction and non-fiction submissions for it. Linda is the author of Seven Laurels, which is a wonderful book that you should read, and she's one of the […]
Today is independence day and for once I’m declaring independence from writing about writing to tell you about something else that is going on. My wonderful friend and photographer extraordinaire, Suzanne Peters is having an Independence Day sale on some of her most popular photographs. It’s a two-for-one deal on her amazing angel photos, which […]
Life just doesn't turn out the way we think its going to most of the time. I remember looking at my daughter's high school yearbook the year she graduated. All of the earnest expressions of hopes and dreams made me feel so bittersweet. All those beautiful young people thought they had it all dialed in, […]
So, I spent a bit of time saving western civilization yesterday afternoon. How? I got lost in a book. I've been hearing a bit of the buzz over the last few days about the cover story in this month's Atlantic, titled, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" (Please note: stupid is spelled that way on the […]
The other day–last week, actually–I was at a Starbucks in a suburb of PDX, working on stuff for my novel while I waited for an appointment. Specifically, I was working on character bios. I'd printed out the character dossiers I always fill in (which have spaces for things like height, weight, hair color, etc.) and […]
I have, as always, a multitude of pithy thoughts on the subject of writing to share with you, but all I lack is the time to sit down and write them out. (I'm telling you, I need an Iphone, then I could share a post from where-ever I happened to find myself.) I've been out […]
I wrote about Collecting as Fertilizer a couple days ago, the idea being that collecting is the antidote for facing a blank page. In that post, I focused mainly on the benefits of keeping a writer's journal and noting descriptions, dialogue, or anything you might want to later remember or expound on. But there are […]
…and more books, delivered right to my door. In the Proof There is a God Department, I recently got on the press release list of a PR firms that deals with authors, or at least their press releases. The press releases come directly to my inbox, and here's the clincher–at the bottom of the release […]
I was reading back through some old posts on John Chow and found one wherein he describes a fellow Canadian blogger asking for a new Mac. She just asked. And someone sent her one. So, for the record, there are two things I really, really want. An Iphone and a Kindle. Just in case someone […]
