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 […]
I may have already written about this before–and I reserve the right to write about it again. Does anyone else have that thing where you forget what you’ve written? It’s not age, or fading brain cells, it comes from writing a lot and being so present with what I’m writing that I forget everything that […]
You may have noticed my periodic call for people who would like to become contributors to a new book review site. I am pleased to announce that the new site is live and ready to roll. Here’s the site url: http://wordstrumpet.typepad.com/bookstrumpet/ This is only the very modest beginning. Expect more to come, with additional reviews […]
One of the best tools a writer can learn is the art of listening. Actually, learning to listen is a useful tool for any human, period. I spent the weekend in a workshop with people who had varying degrees of skills in listening, which has had me pondering the subject. As my good and wise […]
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, […]
One of the prerequisites to being a writer is curiosity. Period. You can't be bored with the world if you want to write. And the good news is that writing not only forces you to engage with the world but the act of it is so engaging, that as a writer it is a crime […]
I flew down to LA on Friday and at the moment I'm staying in Pasadena. It is probably in the mid to high 90s at the moment, but yesterday and Friday, the temps were around 106-107. Gee-zus. This is way too hot for an Oregon native like me, especially given that we've not had much […]
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 […]
