Last week I finished reading The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean. I’d always been interested in reading this book because Dean is a Seattle author and I happened to be in Seattle when her book was released. I remember sitting in the window of my room on the eighth floor of the Red Lion […]
Does anybody other than me remember the magazine with the same name as this post? It was pretty racy stuff back in the day–women confessing their deep, dark secrets, though nowadays what with the advent of internet porn, the stories in True Confessions would be very tame. I’m not even sure if it exists anymore. […]
Start from where you are now is good advice for anything, really, but it is especially good for writing. You can’t really do anything else, yet we convince ourselves that we can, and that furthermore, we really can’t write anything until we do. What do I mean by this? Let me illustrate by talking about […]
Um…it appears that somewhere in a flurry of writing, November passed me by and it is now December. Are you guys aware of this? And so now that it is December, that means that Nanowrimo is officially over. I think it must have been around Thanksgiving that I abandoned the pretense that I was actually […]
I’ve been working hard all week on a deadline for a book project I’m working on. I tend to get myself into these binds where I have to set aside all my other writing–blogging, working on the novel–in order to meet a deadline. At the same time, I’ve recently been starting to study Zen. Though […]
Well, it has been Thanksgiving weekend here in the states and the third week of November in the rest of the world. While I’d like to report that my life has consisted of nothing but feasting and revelry, such is not the case. I will admit to my fair share of festive partying, but I […]
So, I seem to be on a lessons-I’ve-learned-from-my-pug writing kick. I wrote about Igor in terms of writing blocks earlier this week. This morning I was finishing up putting on my make-up when the pug started scrabbling on the door, wanting to be let in. Igor’s scrabbling consists of scraping a paw against the sliding […]
So, I’m currently finishing up reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has been on the best-seller list for quite some time. I generally don’t read bestsellers. It is the anti-authoritarian streak in me, or perhaps more to the point, the I-don’t-want-to-do-what-everyone-else is doing streak. My family knows the best way to get me […]
So, it appears I’m having an issue with my comments feature. It reminds me of the game one finds at carnivals and fairs, which are among my favorite things on earth. (My daughter constantly tells me I have a tragic tacky streak, and I trace it back to my love of all things Carney. More […]
It has been raining hard here in Portland the last couple of days. This morning, I watched water drip off the giant fir in my backyard as I waited for my Pug to finish his business. He is fat very muscular and blind visually impaired and he does not like to be in the rain […]
