OK, I’m back! Real life has intruded on my blogging quite a bit this spring, some of which I want to write about in some posts soon. My partner and I have been taking care of her 88-year-old Grandma Ruth, who had been ill for a long time with stage 3 breast cancer and passed [...]
Archive for the 'life' Category
back at it after an unplanned hiatus
novel report
So. The bad news is that the second act is a mess, and my first reader alerted me to the fact that my story actually starts with a scene well into the first act. Last night at writers’ group was the first time I’d touched the manuscript in more than a week because I’d been [...]
and then I got ticked off (updated!)
A friend asked if I’d seen this op-ed by David Alpaugh in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. I responded to her directly, then figured, why waste a good rant? (Thanks for the nudge, Gretchen.) Yes I did see this, and it ticked me off because it’s insipid. There’s too much poetry! The good stuff gets [...]
e-books, hard copies, hook-ups and wives
This afternoon I heard more hand-wringing from yet another commentator (this one an author, Eric Weiner, on NPR) about the demise of paper books and the rise of electronic editions. Here’s an excerpt: I’m confident that I’ll still get my fair share from each e-book sold. But as an author, I’m not after your money. [...]
writer’s bookshelf: negotiating with the dead by margaret atwood
Is it Tuesday already? Right-o. Here’s a book I’ve kept handy for several years now: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood (Cambridge UP, 2002), based on a series of lectures she gave at Cambridge on the process of writing and her ideas about identity and the writer. Part memoir, part [...]