I never intended to write a sequel. I’ve always thought of my novels as one-offs, stories that may be open-ended at their conclusion, but still convey the sense on the last page that things are done. Sequels are for mystery writers and writers of...
My husband and I push a cart through Target. Bearing a list, he is purposeful: coffee, cat litter, Tums, toothpaste. I, along for the ride, am easily diverted. “I’ll catch up with you,” I...
Not long ago I read a thread on Twitter in which dozens of young writers were bemoaning the fact that they had not yet been published. They had set goals for themselves and worried that they had not yet met these goals as they were approaching...
Today (Feb. 23) is the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats who was twenty-five when he died, an astoundingly young age for such a great poet and sage. The legacy of his that has affected me most profoundly is his idea of Negative...
When my son was in late elementary/early middle school, he and two of his best friends favored a gamed I call “How About,” because that was always the way the game began. “How about I’m king of the river and you’re trying to get across and I try...
When I began working on my novel Weather Woman back in 2013, I had no idea I was writing Climate Fiction, now commonly referred to as Cli-fi. I’d never heard of Cli-fi before—most people hadn’t—I was simply exploring a What-if premise that...
When my partner reads my fiction—he’s always my first reader—he invariably rolls his eyes. He doesn’t understand why I’m so stingy with commas. This has happened to us enough times that we merely laugh about it. I’ve been a punctuation rebel for...
I am just now, on the heels of the election, beginning to write a new novel. As often happens, several obsessions I’ve been nursing for a while, have suddenly come together as a narrative, as if they were charged magnets, needing to connect. It’s...
A few months ago a friend decided she didn’t like reading on her Kobo and she gave it to me. The timing was perfect. I had just returned from a 5-week trip on which I’d run out of reading material. Though I have been staunchly resistant to...
I don’t see many movies on the big screen these days, but I made the effort to see WONDER WOMAN after reading several good reviews and hearing an interview with Jill Lepore, who wrote an entire book about the history of Wonder Woman. The film was...
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