Going to share a couple of posts today. This first one is about the book that wasn't, or isn't, or won't be. There's a great quote from Philip Roth, "Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it." For me this applies completely to writing, but not necessarily [...]
Category: Woman
Patti Smith, Just Kids
I loved this memoir from Patti Smith of her early years in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of the subject matter might not be everyone's cup of tea, the title doesn't reveal that this is a book for adults, and it is quite gritty in places. They were completely immersed in the artist/writer/rock/poet/underground cultural [...]
Undone
The other day, in promoting my vampire novel, I posted links to chapter excerpts. In reading through those excerpts again myself, I noticed places where the sentences could use tightening. I noticed places where I want to replace commas with periods. In reading one of my own stories earlier today, I found an instance where [...]
The Next Voice You Hear
https://youtu.be/tO9rjBxI1gc https://youtu.be/LZ1M9JSGTLk Currently listening to Jackson Browne, discovering T Bone Burnett, trying to catch up on episodes of the podcast "Cocaine and Rhinestones." Reading "Cotton Tenants: Three Families" by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans. Here's the synopsis from Amazon, "In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now [...]
One November, I Published Two Books
I've worked hard the last couple of years to get some books published, I'm thinking of them as there were "the first five," and now there is "the magnificent seven." I also have stories in three print anthologies, and I'm going to get those linked up with cover pictures, as well as having been published [...]
Maybelline Raven and The Wolf.
The year is 1762. Maybelline Raven is waiting patiently along the banks of the Mississippi River for the return of her husband so they may venture north, with their children. When the people of the village begin to perish after Maybelline is attacked, it is feared that a wolf is in their midst. As Maybelline [...]
Gold Mine, These Are the Words I Managed to Save
During the fall months of 2008 and on into 2009, and on for a while, reality slipped away from me. Amid the avalanche of dissipating solidity descending into complete confusion and chaos of thought, I threw more than twenty years of writing, of work, into a cauldron of flames. Two file boxes of poems, stories, [...]
Saint Joan
I've fallen in love with the work of Joan Didion. Her observations on life, her dealings with grief, with the death of both her husband and her daughter within two years of one another, her belief in the value of introspection, of sorting ones own thoughts, arranging them in a manner that increases their clarity [...]
The Return of Loralee
Why I Write Fiction
Sometime last winter, I posted on a temporary page that I had going on that I was going to write this particular thing, and then I was going to write that thing, and then I was going to write this other thing. Then I looked at it and I thought, but, I don't do that, [...]
The Slick Furies.
I'm super tired. Is that the best time to write a blog post? Hopefully this won't be too rambling. I have surpassed the sixty thousand word mark on the edits/re-write of the vampire novel. I have approximately sixty-six pages of the original text, about twenty thousand words, to finish, knowing that I'll likely add a [...]
Strong. Woman.
This statue, this sculpture, this piece of art, is how I feel, today, at forty-seven and a half years old. I don't recall where I grabbed this picture from so I apologize for not crediting whomever the artist (Penny Hardy) is. In addition to music, I also occasionally use artwork, pictures, paintings, photographs, for inspiration [...]
Bones: This One Was Different
There were others, they brought me flowers, but this one was different. He brought me a perfectly dissected frog, put it in a little shoe box, wrapped a red bow around it. He wanted me to see what one should look like, dissected properly, plus it saved me from having to do it myself and [...]
