I am participating in Camp Nanowrimo this month. What this is a mini – if you choose it to be – version of Nanowrimo. Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month and it’s a webpage, an online group, an organization, a movement! that inspires and supports writers to complete the rough draft of a novel…
Category: Writing Wednesdays
Evading the Wool Suit is Easy if I’m Dreaming, or Writing
My life post teaching career has shifted incrementally but consistently since the big change. I’m not sure if it’s like aftershocks or more like when something settles back down after really being tossed around. It’s been exactly a year. Today is the last day of school and I never went back once, not to visit…
Writing Wednesdays: No Man’s Land
There is a sweet spot, a perfect place I like to be with my writing. There is also the wet cement place. The place of nothing but frustration and obligation. Where am I right now? Smack in the middle of the two. My paradise as a writer is new creation. Writing the outline. Talking…
Writing Wednesdays: All The Feels
Distractions! Flowers and kittens and my dog and funny hats and clown noses. Whatever it takes. I’m not talking about distractions from my writing time, all I need is my phone for that. I’m talking about distracting Babu from things that upset her. This is more important than making her happy, it’s keeping her healthy. …
Writing Wednesday: Progress!…?
I have been slaving away on two pieces. (Well, three if you count the blog.) Piece one is the umpteenth revision of my first novel and reading, no joke, this book: and getting ready to write a query and look for an agent. Woosh! A lot to do, for sure. I’m also working on a…
Writing Wednesday: Writing About Something Else in Times of Public Tragedy.
Yesterday, I get breakfast prepared, lay out the evil thing that is the newspaper amid the bananas and orange juice and oatmeal and coffee in a cute owl shaped mug and, when Babu emerges from the bathroom, I tie an apron around her waist and push in her chair. She settles in and looks down…
Writing Wednesdays: Hashtag Writing Life
My favorite day of the week is Thursday. I can hear the neighborhood begin to wake up at dusk with the early revilers. I love days with six letters like Monday and Friday. They are shorter to type. I always have to speak Wednesday phonetically as I write it. I love Sundays because I am…
Writing Wednesdays: A Poem
I go back and forth about not titling a poem. Is it just lazy? An attempt to be cool? Mostly it’s a missed opportunity. And yet, if the poem seems to be asking to remain untitled, don’t I have to listen? Pelicans circle in flocks over the beach Attempting the grace of hawks on the…
Writing Wednesday Do I dare?
I have dared to quit my job. I have dared to start a career as a writer. I have dared to write a novel. I have dared to post on my blog every day for a year. I have dared to, out loud, call myself a writer. Nothing is as scary thus far as beginning…
Writing Wednesday: The Disconnect
The most cruel thing to happen to a writer? The most discouraging phenomena? It happens all the time. It’s that leap from head to paper. I cannot tell you how many times I have wandered around my house, or was driving, or in the shower, and a story flows through my head like ambrosia. It’s…
Writing Wednesdays: Writing Non Fiction
It makes me nervous. It’s also all that more exciting. I forget all the time for brief moments that the people in these books, besides Babu, are real. Yes, maybe they have mostly all passed, but their children and grandchildren haven’t. Meeting Kathy last weekend and hearing her talk about the past and all the…
Writing Wednesday #4: It Takes a Graveyard to Raise a Child
There be spoilers. That is the belief which fuels the novel The Graveyard Book written by Neil Gaiman. It takes a graveyard to raise a child. An orphaned boy evades an untimely death when he wanders into a graveyard, and away from the murderous war path of a cold and precise hitman, and is taken…
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