Archive for October, 2010

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Divorce

I don’t know when I get up in the morning if the work will go well or easily or if it will be like trying to invent a language to say what I need to. I’m thinking of one of those days when you go to the gym and all the twenty pound weights are masquerading as ten pounders and the second hand on the clock is stuck at three quarters of the hour you’ve promised you’ll spend on the treadmill.



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My So-Called Literary Life

I miss having students. For a long time I ran a read and critique group called The First Hundred pages. We met on Thursdays and reading submissions took me most of Wednesday. Some students started raw and got well cooked. A couple went on to be selling authors. One doesn’t sell much but she wins prizes all the time.


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My True Confession

I’ve decided to come clean about my early life of crime. When I was in the sixth grade I wrote my first novel, over one hundred pages long, on school paper. Stolen paper from the supply cabinet at what was then the University Avenue School. I have to say in my own defense that it didn’t feel like stealing because in those days California public schools were rich in supplies and no one cared how much we used. There was unlimited lined and colored paper, enough pencils to build a fort, crayons and boxes of chalk that made a satisfying clink when you shook them, scissors for right and left handers. The supply room was huge and lined with shelves that almost literally bowed under the weight of rainbow colored construction paper. And there were enough rolls of crepe paper to festoon the city.


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Postpartum Depression

I’m going through a kind of postpartum depression now.


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Launching The Good Sister

Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. The time for alterations and refinements has passed. THE GOOD SISTER has stepped into the world for all to see and read and talk about and must now float, fly, skid, sink or swim on its own merits. How do I feel about this? Well, anyone who’s had a child go off to college in a distant, dangerous city can probably approximate the emotions: excitement, anxiety, satisfaction, hope, thrill, worry. In the case of this book which was so exhausting to write, I’m relieved and a little bit amazed that I survived the experience.


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