Oh, forever ago when I was young and foolish and had just moved back to New York City from Boston, I took a job at an investment bank. I had lived in dorms, or with room-mates, since I left home for college, and I really wanted to have an apartment of my own. And I wanted it within spitting distance of my childhood home in Greenwich Village, which was, on the face of it, ambitious to the point of insanity. So I took a job that paid very well, on… Read more The Long and Short of It →
Tis the season of giving thanks. Or perhaps of giving gratitude. I’ve been thinking about this some–not least because Thursday is the American Thanksgiving, which really should not just be about food, but somehow always is (OK, maybe a smidge about the Macy’s parade, and in some households about football, or not killing Uncle Pete who always arrives drunk and has unfortunate opinions), but because I listened to a piece on NPR about a Japanese discipline of mindful thankfulness, which sounds like something I want more of in my life.
I got invited to do a cool thing! (Okay, part of my delight is that I don’t think of myself as being part of the cool crowd, and therefore, being invited to do a cool thing plucks at my deeply-buried high school nerd self.) A few months ago a writer of my acquaintance asked me if I’d like to be involved in a Serial Box project. “Serial what now?” I said, with my customary aplomb. It was explained to me: Serial Box is a new venture that takes as its model the… Read more Writing in (Yet Another) New Way →
Emily, seen left, is 9 1/2 years old. She weighs 48 pounds, almost all of it muscle and fur (plus a little drool). She is a large fur-shedding machine whose… Read more It’s Not Easy Being the Little Dog →
I saw something the other day that made me really angry, in that “what, were you raised in a woodshed or something?” sort of way. Prolonged, self-involved, privileged rudeness makes me on-beyond-cranky. And as I watched this behavior continue I realized that the perpetrator really had no idea of what he was doing. I was at a cafe, writing (I have said elsewhere that getting out of the house and away from its distractions is a must for me). There were others there, also working diligently, drinking coffee or nibbling… Read more Punching Down →
I think I was 13 when I discovered, more or less all at once, Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart, Jane Aiken Hodge, and “romantic suspense,” a broad category that included different sorts of… Read more A Little Etiquette, a Little Incense, a Little Edge →
I am eleven chapters, give or take, into the WIP. Since my books tend to work out to about 20 chapters it is fair to say that I’m half way through the… Read more The Gooey Center →
Because my husband works in the film industry, we sometimes get to see early screenings–or screenings that are remarkable because the director is there, or we’re in the company of… Read more Fixing the Future? →