If you ask how my novel is going, I might reply “Oh, it’s going.” I’m afraid the vagueness of the statement is a way of avoiding the complicated truth of my work-in-progress. It’s, well, complicated: intricate, constantly evolving, and epic. This means it can be overwhelming and life-consuming, but nonetheless compelling. Since January I’ve begun thinking […]
Written Saturday. This is the first time in about a week that I’ve felt human. This bad cold was, I suppose, my reward for making it all the way through winter without so much as a sniffle. I rested much of the week in bed, easily tired, enduring the congestion and the coughing. I had an appetite […]
I’ve grown to appreciate Han Solo as a bearer of no-frills wisdom. You might remember this scene from The Empire Strikes Back. The Empire has the Millennium Falcon in hot pursuit, and the hyperdrive doesn’t work. Only Han’s wild piloting stands between them and capture. He decides to head for an asteroid field. Leia protests. […]
One of my greatest joys as a writer is discovering and using new color words. I was the sort of child who drooled over 96- or 128- count boxes of crayons and colored pencils, poured over my mother’s Land’s End catalogues for the hues of turtlenecks and sundresses, and spent far too much time picking […]
Discipline… it’s such a scary topic for a blog post. But. I can’t be the only writer who struggles with it. In the Fall, I set a goal of writing 4,000 words a week for my novel. This naturally broke into roughly three or four evenings of writing. But I failed to have a clear vision of what […]
