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 […]
I'm totally inspired by Carol Schillios. She's a friend of a friend, who I'm hoping to get to meet later on this summer. Carol runs Fabric for Life, a microcredit enterprise which gets young women who have been reduced to begging on the streets (or worse) and teaches them to create items such as fabric […]
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 […]
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 […]
Awhile back I wrote a post called The Rule of Threes. In re-pondering this again recently, the thought occurs that I'm not generally much of a rule follower. In fact, you might even accurately describe me as a person who is incapable of following rules. I break them like crazy in real life (which is […]
Facing a rewrite can be difficult, if not downright daunting. You've written a draft (or two, or three), gotten feedback, and now you're ready to make the changes in your manuscript. So you open the file on your computer….and sit there and stare at the words on the page. Let's admit it, sometimes confronting a […]
A couple weeks ago my dining room table was covered with china, cut glass, pitchers, and an odd assortment of knick-knacks. This was all stuff brought over from my Mom's house, which we were cleaning out before an estate sale. I was really happy with all the things I'd claimed but the problem was that […]
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 few days ago I wrote a post titled, What About Not Writing? which pondered the question of whether it was ever a good idea to take a break from writing. As is often the case, the post garnered some interesting responses, because, well, I have fabulously interesting readers (Brief aside: as a general rule, […]
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 […]
