Happy belated Persian New Year to all! :) Very often it’s after I’ve declared a section “done” that I start getting the flood of ideas I wish I’d gotten when I was first drafting the thing. “Hey, wouldn’t it be better if [x] happened instead?!” Yes, yes it would. I usually go back and make those changes immediately, especially if they precipitate changes that will carry forward through the rest of the manuscript. I also make sure to correct any…
It’s rare indeed that I can say I got to enjoy sunshine and birds singing on my birthday, which is nestled deep in the most hopeless stretch of winter. A welcome surprise in the moment—but also ominous, what with climate change and all. More and more, our weather has been more reminiscent of Florida than Pennsylvania … more on that in a bit. Writing Updates I have the informal goal of drafting a chapter roughly every 2 weeks, giving myself…
I saw a tweet the other day (sadly, I forget by whom) about how we Americans obsess over productivity and efficiency gains when the most rewarding things we’ll ever do in life—for instance, learning something new or producing something creative—are extremely inefficient processes. It really made me sit back and go, “Huh.” I like to envision my creative process as whittling a statue from a block of marble: put in time and effort, and voila! Finished product. Only it’s not…
October wasn’t any less turbulent than September. My second surprise biopsy in as many months (benign, thankfully, but I had to wait 2 weeks to hear that), accidentally injuring my foot and damaging my car in unrelated incidents, my husband out of town for multiple weeks (still not back yet), and a shooting that makes international news happening half a mile from my house. The past few days have been surreal. I need to cry once in a while, but…
This was a crazy month. A great deal of phone calls, appointments, tests, waiting, tears, and panic have led to the following conclusion: I have a benign tumor that, because of its positioning, needs to come out. Surgery is penciled in for November. It’s an outpatient procedure and shouldn’t be a huge deal—assuming I clear the final hurdle where they biopsy what they take out to make 100% sure there’s no malignancy. The chance of that is low, but not…
Happy long weekend for those celebrating Labor Day! With highs in the 90s here, it certainly doesn’t feel like summer’s ending yet. I’m looking forward to fall, if or when it arrives! Writing Updates My latest Book 3 draft: 6 chapters/24K words in the can, now working on chapter 7. At this point I’m doing more rewriting from scratch than editing, incorporating details from my earlier drafts that are salvageable, but those are becoming few and far between. I do…
This past Saturday, my city shut down a loop of streets to traffic and opened them up to walkers, runners, and bikers. I happen to live near that loop, so it was easy to head out and join the fun. What a turnout! I’ve never seen so many cyclists in one place before. It was a lot of fun walking directly on some of the major thoroughfares in our city :) Why didn’t I join the cyclists? I’ve told this…
My favorite local coffee shop is changing ownership! The owner is selling his business to a chain. As of this week, the menu offerings, staff, and atmosphere will be completely different. No more local art and photography on the walls. No more chats with the employees and owner when things are slow. I’m rather bummed, as the owner was one of the people who encouraged me to get out of the full-time corporate rat race. It’s not something everyone can…
This is my last blog post before my husband and I fly to Rome, where we’ll be staying from the end of April into May. So yes, my next blog post will be delayed, but hopefully I’ll have some nice stories to tell! Things are getting all too real as I work on the nitty-gritty details, like figuring out what my poor cat is going to eat. He normally eats wet food, but we’ll need to transition him to at…
This is kind of embarrassing, but … I sometimes draft more easily while lying down? The days I’m most productive word-wise seem to be the ones where I’m lying in bed or on the couch. And I definitely brainstorm best away from the computer, with paper and pencil … also often on the floor or in bed. Maybe relaxing all those muscles tells my brain to relax and let words and thoughts out? It doesn’t sound so crazy—but then what…