Coming up is the great celebration of writing, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Time for me to clear a writing space on the cluttered catch all table in my kitchen that I use during NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo started 17 years ago as an effort to encourage writing. Every November all are challenged to write a […]
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I spent the last week in New York. I walked along Broadway, Times Square And had soup from the soup Nazi! I also toured Carnegie Hall and the Alvin Ailey School of Dance, all to assist me with the novel I am currently working on. Have I told you lately how much I love […]
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“I can’t do this anymore! I’m no business woman. I quit,” I said last week when receiving notice about a form I was supposed to have filed but hadn’t. Sometimes I just don’t know, what I don’t know, which leads to frustration. Over twenty years ago, as a lay woman running a Catholic Church, […]
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Sometimes life throws us a curve ball, sometimes more than one at a time. Three weeks ago, I came home from a brief retreat at my brother’s cottage to the sound of rushing water, coming from the depths of our house. It took ten days, and periods of shutting the water off, to finally find […]
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In the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, there is a maze that the students compete in that changes it’s pathways as you walk through it. This means that you can’t go back the way you came in because that way no longer exists. Driving my car […]
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During my thirties and forties, I had a number of books of daily meditations. The idea was that by reading these positive reflections every day, eventually I would internalize their message and change negative thinking patterns. I read them faithfully for years. I remember one meditation that spoke of depletion and depression. When starting to […]
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This past weekend, I had a chance to get away to Pentwater, MI. We didn’t arrive until 8p.m. on Friday, and left by 9:30a.m. on Sunday, and it was rainy most of Saturday, still it was worth it to get away even for a short time. While listening to the rain pour down Saturday morning, […]
Read MoreI’m looking for some very special people–beta readers. These are people who, out of the kindness of their heart and their love of reading, will read a manuscript in process without pay and give you feedback. They are an essential part of the writing process. There comes a point with any large writing process where […]
Read MoreMany months ago, on The Creative Penn blog, I read an interview with a prolific writer who wrote a book practically every month. As part of the interview, Joanna Penn and this author talked about the common practice by some of treating their manuscript like a baby, a creative baby. They agreed that maybe for […]
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I’ve had a great July. I focused on writing the first draft of the next novel in my Dancing through Life Series. The only problem is that in order to do that, I had to neglect other aspects of writing and life. You might say, I’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul. Now I’m playing […]
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