A few weeks ago I realized I needed to simplify my life to maintain focus on finishing my novel-in-progress. That is when I put this blog into what I’ve called “A Brief Pause,” so I would stop writing about matters of life and death and focus on...
A Fiction Outtake–Week #2 of A Brief Pause
In the course of writing and editing any novel, a lot is cut. Numerous reasons lie behind the cutting. The material might be unnecessary or repetitive; the sentences may be lackluster or too showy; the writing might be downright boring. Often...
A Brief Pause
Dear Readers, The time has come for me to make a temporary change in this weekly forum. In order to focus more fully on completing my novel-in-progress before my hands give out, the nature of my posts will be shifting for a couple of months...
Finding Flow
It’s early morning and my husband is outside tending to his tomato plants. He moves among them with an electric toothbrush, buzzing the blossoms to encourage them to pollinate and produce more tomatoes. When he’s done, he moves onto the lettuce...
When Independence Slips Away
I recently returned from a writing residency on the high desert of Central Oregon, a magical place couched between a ridge of low mountains and a dry—in the summer—lakebed. The buildings are situated near a pond with shade trees where all variety...
The Treasures of Spring Cleaning: Tell Them What They Mean to You
The arrival of spring reliably brings with it the urge to clean up, throw things out, and bring order to the accumulated dust and detritus of indoor living. The urge comes to me in unpredictable waves and must be acted upon immediately before it...
What Do You Have To Teach?
A few years ago, not long before the pandemic began, I made the decision to stop teaching and become a full-time writer. I was a little hesitant to give up my affiliation with the university and its creative writing program, but I also knew I was...
Unfinished Business
I am working as diligently as I can on a new novel, but novels cannot be rushed, and at the end of every work day, as I lay down the unfinished manuscript, a thought haunts me. What if I don’t have time to finish this novel and it is...
Adult Bibs, Evasive Mint: Creating Character Memes
My family of Boomers and Millennials is just concluding a week-long reunion. We have matured and ripened over the years so this recent gathering was rife with laughter and devoid of the tensions from gatherings in the past. The...
Would We Write If We Were Immortal?
I have been thinking a lot about mortality these days, not morbidly, but with curiosity about what it means to live a life with the uncomfortable, sometimes scary, knowledge that it will certainly come to an end. A recent interview in The Sun...