An Example of How Brilliant I Am

Something to keep in mind: I should make sure to type in my correct phone number on the supporting materials when applying for writing awards! I am using the last hours with my computer to get a new application ready and discovered, to equal amusement and horror, that I applied to an award this past [...]

Return to Paper

My laptop will be leaving me tomorrow. It has a small crack in the palm rest and I am sending it away to be fixed. I have been told it will take seven to ten business days, though all they have to do is pop off the top case and put a new one on. [...]

Damage

The discovery of Writer, Rejected’s “Literary Rejections on Display” blog yesterday set into motion a series of thoughts in my demented head.
First, commiseration. I feel you, Writer, Rejected. It fucking sucks. And at the same time it can also be really, really funny. Heart-wrenchingly funny. The kind of funny that gives you nosebleeds.
I felt that [...]

After the Weekend

We returned to the city last night. As you may have guessed from my “Fictions” post below, my so-called writing retreat turned into more of a weekend of not so much writing as relaxing (i.e., reading, swinging in the hammock, watching the pond, taking a languid nap on the couch). Also checking my email and [...]

Fictions

I write enough to merit being a writer.
No one could say I am wasting my life away.
I am deep enough into a novel that I will not try to pull myself out.
I am not going to restart the novel AGAIN.
I am confident.
I still believe I will make it.
I will not give up.
I am perfectly capable [...]

Such Quiet

While the world goes on at home—the familiar noise, the banging, the whoops, the heels on floorboards, the stumbles on stairs, the sirens, the honks, the car alarms going off again, the incessant buzzing of someone who wants to get into the building but doesn’t live here, our neighbor slamming her door then forgetting something [...]

Soon There Will Be Trees

E and I are going on a short retreat this weekend. There will be trees. There will be a pond. There will be quiet, I am sure of it, some quiet. Cicadas at night, too. Or will they be crickets? I doubt I’ll know the difference.
Usually I never want quiet; I live in New [...]

Hello

Hello, spot against the wall.
It feels like it’s been such a long time since I sat at this table, with the time to write whatever I want. Really it’s been about a week, but that week had enormous proportions. It was a week in which I felt barely a thought of my own, just this [...]

Limping Through to Next Weekend

I have made it through the weekend. I write this early Monday morning. I have finished not one but two enormous freelance deadlines, working more hours in the day than I normally do during the week at work, dragging myself around, forcing myself to keep going, because when someone says the deadline is Monday I [...]

Adaptability, Good Books, and Being Weird

Something I learned from moving to houses in different towns and school districts as a kid, and through the co-op program in college, where I alternated quarters of classes with quarters of full-time internships in different locations and among different people, was how to adapt. And quickly. Because soon it would be time to move [...]

A Book That Must Be Written

I had lunch with another writer yesterday. She, too, writes on the side, in the hours behind and before and in between work. She, too, is trying to find the balance. She told me that she’s been writing her novel for close to thirty years. Really, she admitted, on and off it’s really been that [...]

Progress

I had some creative progress this week. A light turning on inside me. A feeling of excitement. It was caused by a single scene involving a large body of water in one of my unfinished short stories, just the one scene, just the one tiny story, and yet it was a light nonetheless. For some [...]

Reminder: The World Does Not, in Fact, Revolve Around Me

I am so bothered by the arrangement of the tables at my morning writing spot—notice I said “MY morning writing spot” and not the one-of-many neighborhood Starbucks; I am so entitled. It used to be that the tables were set up in such a way that writers would line up here, laptops plugged in, and [...]

Punishment

The rule—who am I to make rules when I always itch to break them?—is that if I am not able to focus on my own writing, be it the novel reinvention, be it the story, be it the other story, be it the YA proposal I should have done last month, be it anything I [...]

Muted Morning

Today is a national holiday, which for a solid hour this morning meant a languid quiet I am not used to from living close to a decade in this city. It will get noisy later, with the fireworks, with the beer on the rooftop, the girl with the agonizingly loud laugh in the courtyard at [...]

This Small Spot in My Heart

Amid a confusing collection of emotions, the monster of self-doubt carrying what feels like a truckload of rejection letters, the exhaustion, the loss of all sense of time, the regret, the REGRET, I am still here. Mistakes have been made. There is no time travel invented (that I know of) to fix them. I have [...]