NaNo Yes or NaNo No…or NaNo Sort of?

If you’ve been around this space any length of time, you’ll know I’ve documented my feelings and beliefs about NaNoWriMo before–and if I had bothered to stick one of those widgets with keyword terms in the sidebar (and if I had bothered to keyword all of my posts) you’d be able to find them all. […]

Double Post Monday!

Schnikies, it’s usually all I can do to get one post out on any given day, and here I am with a second. Well, there’s news–no, not that news, news that may be good for you! Agent Carrie Pestritto, the wonderful woman who represents yours truly, is offering a chance at a free critique of […]

Weekend Update: Change Is Good

If you’ve been reading this space for any length of time, then you’re almost certainly aware that I am a card-carrying member of that subset of writers known as ‘Wingman’. I am not a planner, not an outliner, not a plotter. I plunk myself down at the keyboard and start writing and just let it […]

OMG! Look What Happened To….

Social media exploded this week when a Hollywood star stepped out on the red carpet for the first time in a while. I’m talking, of course, about Tony Sirico. Here he is in his most famous role, as Paul Gualtieri, aka “Paulie Walnuts,” in The Sopranos: Can peel paint from a house at distances up […]

HEY!

Somebody stole my Monday post–it was a good one, too. If you see it, please let me know.

Am I the Only One…

…who sees a problem here? As you may have heard by now, super-famous author John Grisham did an interview with the British paper earlier this week in which he made some…interesting…statements (the interview will run on Saturday). Somehow in the course of the interview, they ended up on the topic of incarceration. And from there, […]

Monday Musing: A Quote

Last night, I found myself reading an old interview with John Irving (The World According to Garp, In One Person, and one of my all-time favorite books, A Prayer for Owen Meany), and he had this to say: “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep searching for casualties. The […]

Slightly Distracted

The Magpie has been in Japan for a month. Since arriving, she’s experienced: -One earthquake -One volcano (no, she was not on the mountain) -One typhoon (Phanfone, which dumped nearly 11″ of rain on Tokyo last week) And now, she’s got this bearing down on her: Here’s a view taken from astronaut Reid Wiseman’s Twitter […]

Musical Monday: Squeeze

Reaching again back into the 80s vault. I’ve always liked this song. What surprised me is that it turned out to be Squeeze’s highest-charting single in the United States, reaching #15 on the Billboard charts. I was sure that something like Tempted or Black Coffee in Bed would have hit higher on the charts; those […]

Unfocused Friday

On Wednesday I drove down into the foothills of the Catskills for a workshop. The drive was incredible. The day was mostly sunny and the foliage down there was slightly more peak than it is up here. The funny thing is that one of the workshop leaders was a man who works for the New […]