What? I haven’t yet written about the show Supernatural on the blog? Color me stunned. (If you don’t know the show, or even don’t like it, we can still be friends, but you might want to read the Supernatural Wikipedia page to catch up.) Tonight my guys and I finished Season 11 of the …Read More

  A 41-inch bust and a lot of perseverance will get you more than a cup of coffee – a lot more. — Jayne Mansfield* *Jayne Mansfield, a tireless seeker of fame and self-improvement, also spoke 5 languages and a reported IQ of 163. February 4  Words Journal: 35  words Long fiction: 1824 words Short …Read More

  Self care, art, and audiobooks were all on my screens this week… Shakespeare was right, after all. Science now tells us that sleep does clean-up in our brains, and may help us to forget what we don’t need to remember. I’m a certified audiobook addict–just ask anyone who rides in my car with me. …Read More

    I’m at that point in the book. It’s one of two moments of intense doubt that show up for me in writing a novel–every single novel. The first moment happens at around twenty-four thousand words. That’s about a quarter of the way in, when the basics of the story are all on the page …Read More

    We had a security alarm incident at our house last weekend. Thank goodness we were home, because one of the fire/heat sensors fell off the ceiling and set off the alarm. It also set off all the smoke alarms and the security panel announced FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! and flashed that the fire department was …Read More

I demand a lot of the books I choose to read. Over the last decade my reading has become more directed–possibly narrower. When I reviewed books for a newspaper, I read widely: biographies, memoirs, literary fiction, history, commercial fiction. While I still read from all of those categories, most often I’ll read literary and commercial …Read More

At the end of last summer I took myself on an Artist Date to Marion, IL, which isn’t far from here. Marion was holding a festival with a car show in their town square, and I particularly wanted to hear my friend, Andrew Staff, and his band, The Swamp Tigers, play. Here’s that post. So many …Read More

    I am a homebody. No two ways about it. Thank goodness I have a job that is means I get to spend lots of time in the place where I love. Okay. That was totally a Freudian typo. I meant to type “the place where I live,” but see how it came out? …Read More

      January 28th Words Journal: 340  words Long fiction: 2026 words Short fiction: 0 Non-fiction: 0 words Blogging: 33 words Exercise: A smoke alarm fell off the ceiling, setting off the house alarm, an event that lasted for ten agonizing minutes during which I sprinted frequently from one end of the house to …Read More

  What a strange week it’s been. After last weekend’s writing retreat, I came home pretty tired, anxious to get the last 20K words done on the novel. I didn’t get as many words done as I hoped, but I’m on track to write the epilogue over the next few days. The other thing I …Read More