Life Through My Lens
The self-inflicted wound of denial
Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me. Every. Single. Time. I'm working on my latest story or making a colorful graph depicting my predicted end date based on my ambitious daily word goals (also a work of fiction, by the way). In the corner of the screen, I...
Life is not all unicorn farts and sprinkles.
What follows is an abbreviated version of a text exchange that transpired this morning—after the reality that my kid is all grown up and moving across the country in three months hit me right in the forehead, and I spent a sleepless night thinking about all the things...
Revising: A part of life
At a conference last year, an author spoke about revising her manuscripts with a look of rapture usually reserved for the sacred or the sensual. My first thought? Are you kidding me?! What about revising and editing could possibly evoke this level of euphoria?...
Critique Partners: For Writing and Living
Before I began writing seriously, I saw it as a singular pursuit. I imagined a disheveled person at a desk in a windowless room with a half-drunk cup of cold coffee and maybe a sleeping dog. I don’t know why the writer in my mind was unkempt, perhaps because I...
You can’t shovel snow with the handle.
A wise friend made a point with me last week. My friend sent me a photograph of a snow shovel ( a tool with which I am all too familiar). The caption said, ‘This is a great tool. Unless you’re holding the red end. Then you’re going to be frustrated.’ I love it when...
There is something seriously wrong when a riddle is still a riddle after 50 years.
I walked into a business the other day and, on a white board, there was a riddle: A boy and a doctor were fishing.The boy was the doctor’s son,but the doctor was not the boy’s father.Who is the doctor? A riddle. That’s all it was. A device to occupy one’s mind. A few...