I had a dream last night that my house was crumbling. The front stairway, made of concrete, was so precarious it broke beneath my feet as I tried to mount. The porch displayed its gray, rotted wood in the cloud-light, and the front door was…
OK, this is a quick one, but it’s a lot of fun. An article today in the L.A. Times features a website called “I Write Like” where you can pop in a few paragraphs of text and discover which famous writer your style most resembles.…
Picture taking a baby for its first check-up. The doctor says, “You know, this child has six toes and is missing a finger.” “Doctor, really?” You respond in surprise. All along you’ve seen the extra toe and the missing finger and honestly done your best…
I’m lucky because my boys, ages 6 and 9, still let me read to them each night before bed. They’ve graduated from children’s picture books to novels that develop psyches – Narnia, Harry Potter, the wild, wondrous world of Roald Dahl. Recently I convinced them…
In a revealing email exchange between authors David Gates and Jonathan Lethem posted on the PEN American Center’s website, Lethem bemoans the author’s predicament in the digital age “where the novelists are supposed to shut up and blunder through the dark woods like Salingerian elephants…
Just after I posted yesterday, I got a message from one of our Circle, Marilyn Zion, who recommended a computer app called “Freedom“. She writes: “Have been using “Freedom” for 2 days and wrote straight through from 8:30-12:00 this morning. Didn’t check email or surf…
Apologies for being so delinquent these past two weeks. I’ve been anxiously completing yet another round on my latest novel and couldn’t think of much else until it was done. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been desperately trying to focus on the latest round…
This is a quick one, but you MUST read Garrison Keillor’s heartfelt, ironic and insightful Op-Ed in today’s New York Times: The End of an Era in Publishing. Times are changing so rapidly that none of us can keep pace. What publishing once was, even…
We all hope and pray that the writing we’ve been slaving away at for weeks, months or years is brilliant, publishable, praiseworthy. Sometimes we’re right. More often than not, it seems, we’re wrong. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re bad writers. I found two links…
I’ve started to realize why I keep writing about the South Mountain Reservation. It certainly isn’t for the money (see my last post!), though I’m grateful to be paid at all (thank you, Mary!). Still, each story I post on our local Maplewood Patch is…
It’s a well-known fact that writers rarely make a lot of money at their work. OK, there are exceptions, but most of us can barely afford to buy a blouse with our royalties, never mind J.K. Rowling and her impressive Scottish mansion. Most of us…
These past few weeks have been busy ones for me with several friends launching and promoting their latest works. First came Marc Aronson’s If Stones Could Speak. Then the joyous hullabaloo shared by all The Writers Circle over Stuart Lutz’s The Last Leaf. You all…
