Posts Tagged ‘writing’
What The World Does When You Are Doing Nothing
In the wee hours of Sunday morning, just as Daylight Savings Time kicked in, my delayed flight from Florida finally touched down in Baltimore, which is my home airport. I had been in Tampa for the previous four days, attending an enormous convention of writers, publishers, agents and representatives of writing programs. Each day there…
Read MoreSandwiched Between Chaos And Delight
Our trip over President’s Day weekend to visit my son, daughter-in-law and six-month-old grandson did not begin auspiciously. Before we even arrived in New York, our brand-new dog sitter phoned to tell us that, while she was throwing the ball in the rec room for fetch–crazy Mac, (our youngest Dal), had crashed into the wine…
Read MoreTelling Their Stories
This coming Saturday, January 27th of 2018, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a date when people world-wide will observe the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the Nazi’s most infamous concentration camps. The day stands as a symbol of the tragedy that transpired during their regime in World War II and of the…
Read MoreFood Equals Love
My sister and I are sitting on opposite sides of the table in a drafty Vietnamese restaurant, slurping up bowls of Pho, on the afternoon before New Year’s Eve. We are each consulting our disintegrating copies of The Key To Chinese Cooking, authored by Irene Kuo. In the midst of planning what we are calling…
Read MoreBuilding A Nest In Maryland
For the first time in a long time, children dressed in costumes and shrieking “Trick or Treat” will clamor at the stoop of my house on October 31st. In California, we lived at the end of a long and dark street where no child ever ventured; over the course of the past sixteen years, I…
Read MoreSummer Reading Delights
I am a bit of a compulsive reader. It’s like a hobby, in a way. I’m passionate about it, have fun with it when I am not working, and take joy in all it brings me. I have a suggestion for three books you might sample over the coming summer months. Everyone has time to…
Read MoreBeyond The Here And Now Of Myself
If, as I said in my last newsletter, writers’ lives are ruled by solitude and self-discipline, how then do we go about bringing light into the rooms of the mind where creativity comes to life? After all, we follow our calling for some reason. What compels us to face down our computers every day, and…
Read MoreHow My Readers Waved A Magic Wand
The life of a writer can be lonely and frustrating. If you are not extremely successful, you generally can’t pay your bills without someone else supporting you; and it can be difficult to get published from book to book, even if you are fairly well-known and loved by a devoted cadre of readers. Potential editors…
Read MorePack Rat? Or Purger?…sorting out the trash from the treasure.
I am standing in my attic, looking at the precarious piles of banker’s boxes stacked toward the roof, the five chests of Christmas ornaments, the over-sized carton of old wrapping paper and bows. The yellowed art prints, the discarded lamps, and the spotted mirrors. All the stuff of years past. So many things I should…
Read MoreSpark A Challenge
This past October, I received some news that I was reluctant to write about here. The novel I had been working on, and believed I’d finished, was judged by my literary agent to need more work before she took the book out to market. Why did I choose not to share this disappointment–one that was…
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