Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year! My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a
Read more →There’s an old story about time management and prioritizing that I dearly love, not least because I’ve seen it repurposed several times. The story, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with already, is the one about the professor who walks into class with a large
Read more →Every saga has a beginning, and this one begins four weeks ago, when my editor sent me a three-page, single-spaced revisions e-mail and a copy of the ms. for what is now Across the Great Barrier that was full of comment balloons. It didn’t arrive. We didn’t realize this for
Read more →These days, when people talk about a “Cinderella Story,” they mostly mean the rags-to-riches part. Whether it’s a Cinderella sports team that’s just won the championship (and never mind all the sweat and practice and planning that went into it), or J. K. Rowling’s welfare-mom-to-gazillion-copy-bestseller story, what
Read more →Once again, the auto-posting has failed me. Coming up next: all the posts that didn’t while I was out of town with no internet access. I’ll put the rest of the chapter up in two-day intervals, starting tomorrow morning (Saturday), so people have at least a little
Read more →I am home again after another four-day trip to Chicago to get my Dad’s taxes signed and meet with the lawyer about family business stuff. I am more than a little chuffed, because this is the first time in at least six years that Dad hasn’t needed
Read more →Last Saturday there was a meeting of the local Mythopoeic Society, at which they planned to discuss Thirteenth Child. They very kindly asked me to attend, and spent considerable time arranging to have the meeting on a date when I was sure I could make it. And I
Read more →For those of you just tuning in, I have two sisters who are professional artists. The one who does theater scenery and tromp l’oeil lives here in town, and when I moved into my new house some years back, she decided to paint my closets for me.
Read more →When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of
Read more →It being the new year — and the first year of a new decade — I went poking around the web and noticed a bunch of websites for people’s New Year’s Resolutions. A little further investigation revealed that “write a book” is, in some form or another,
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