Chapter One: Memorial Day I knew from experience a phone call from Colin always ruined my day. So when my ex-husband called at dawn I fumbled the phone and dropped it right after I heard his voice. Before picking [...]
It was a while after my husband left that I remembered my grandmother’s house. My mother’s mother once lived in a house her cousin had won in a poker game. My grandmother and the owner of the house were [...]
There are many ways to learn how to plot. I learned the hard way. I was very honored when Lisa Tener said in an interview that she had really liked the plot of American Queen. Like dialogue, I felt that [...]
I am so honored that Lisa Tener interviewed me for her Spotlight blog on her How to Write a Book site. One thing she said about the book was that the dialogue was great. I was surprised and pleased [...]
It is always a fun guessing game to wonder if writers have taken people from their own lives and turned them into characters.There are some fairly obvious examples, in political satire, for instance. George Orwell’s animals in Animal Farm each [...]
I’m about as white at they come. I don’t mean only skin color—though that shows absolutely no trace of melanin. I’m talking inherited whiteness. And I’m talking acquired whiteness. And, finally, I’m talking about how life hates such neat divisions [...]
I’m a t-ball mom. If national elections took place in the spring, we would be famous. We who drive our kids and black and white balls in the fall switch to kids and baseball gloves in the spring. Same [...]
It took the bite of an orb weaver to make me realize the enormity of it. My husband had left me with two small boy children a couple of months before. He’d taken a job in another state. Our [...]
(Photo by Martin Lenker on Unsplash) It’s 5 a.m. Women everywhere—professional women, mothers, students, writers, dog walkers—I salute you, my fellow cave-dwellers. This may be the only piece of the day we can call our own. The [...]
When my older son arrived from college for a rare weekend visit home this summer, one of his first questions was, "So, Mom, are you still writing at four or five in the morning?" "Yes," I said, "still beating [...]