Mending Habits

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 […]

Never Tell Me The Odds

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. […]

Writing in Color

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: Finding My Footing

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 […]

Journal Making

It was a tough Fall and Christmas. This is measured in the absence of any journal entries after October 29th, a few days before Ninja went in for the appointment that would determine, once and for all, that she had polycystic kidneys. With Thanksgiving and Christmas looming, as well as writing my novel and the […]