I am a big fan of Anne Lamott’s writing about life and about writing. So I’m going to riff on a post about her that is making the rounds. She gave a Ted talk in 2015 about everything she [...]
Most of my clients and students I teach are very aware of the two, well-known paths to publishing: commercial or mainstream publishing and self-publishing. Most aspire to the commercial or mainstream path and some realize that the self-publishing route [...]
My parents were really about as opposite from Archie & Edith Bunker as you could get. My father was an extreme liberal--he was anti-war and very, very, very pro-civil rights. We heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak when my [...]
We all know the rules for punctuating quotes, right? Commas and periods go inside the quotation marks. Colons and semi-colons go outside. [This always reminds me of an ancient skit on SNL which I will mangle but had to [...]
(Photo by Sebastien Boguszewicz via unsplash.com) When I wrote The Algebra of Snow, I was working from a short story I had written quite a bit earlier, while I was living in a log cabin in the wilds of [...]
I often hear from clients as they are getting deeper into a work or closer to publication that they have suddenly developed a fear of hurting someone’s feelings or making someone mad at them. With good reason. I heard [...]
I was going to write about all the things I have coming up—I just launched a new program and am finishing a new book—but I was sidetracked by the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion. Pretty soon I’m going to [...]
I’m pretty sure my kids did most of their growing in summer. I mean, they were often two feet taller in August than they were in May—or it seemed like it anyway. I know that didn’t occur because of [...]
The last time I flew I was eight months pregnant and had my 17-month-old son with me. The plane dropped 500 feet in a hurry as we came in for a landing in New Orleans. “That’s it,” I said [...]