I realize it would be good to come up with a real title for my work-in-progress. For now, I’m calling it Life is Like an Amusement Park, though I don’t think that truly fits what’s happening in the story. So The Haunted Amusement Park? The Mystery of the Haunted Amusement Park? Sounds very Nancy Drew…
Brené Brown ends her Unlocking Us podcast with a rapid fire set of questions for her guest. One of these is, to paraphrase, ‘When you are full of fear, about doing something, what do you do?‘ Tell me if this situation sounds familiar, at least from pre-COVID times. You’re somewhere in a group. Maybe it’s…
Last year I read 33 books. This is well shy of my goal of 50, though I am pleased with the quality of what I read. I’ll share my list and some of my impressions. I’d love to hear what your favorite reads of 2020 were. Sandman Vol. 8, Neil Gaiman, et al. On Earth…
I am in the midst of the second draft of the novel I created during NaNoWriMo. My goal is a chapter a week. I started during the first week of January and I’m got three chapters into second draft, so it’s going well. It feels like a good pace, a pace I can sustain. The…
I’m watching The Stand on CBS. I read the book way back in my early adulthood. I also watched the 1994 TV series. The story made an indelible impression on me. The haunting and revolting image of 99% of the population dead, unattended and rotting. The idea of a world almost empty of people (plus…
I found out about Elizabeth Lesser’s book Cassandra Speaks through Brene’ Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast. The book intrigued me because it promised to speak to the parts of the human story – history – that have been silenced, suppressed or unasked for. The subtitle is ‘When women are the storytellers, the human story changes’. I…
This is day 17 and the minimum target for today is 28,339 words. My word count today is 35,198. At this rate, I’ll hit 50k on November 24th, 6 days ahead of schedule. The key this year has been the pre-planning. I’ve always been a pantser for this event and now I can understand why…
Along with thousands of other wrimos, I’ve completed 8 days of novel writing as part of National Novel Writing Month, popularly known as NaNoWriMo. At the close of my writing session today, I was at 15,490 total words; keeping at a pace of 1700+ per day with some 2k days sprinkled in. To reach the…
NaNoWriMo2020 is now just days away. I started last week with a lot of options for which story take on during my month-long quest for 50K words. One idea was to expand on the story of Merton, the 4 year old who murdered his nanny to open a portal to another dimension and is actually…
There are a lot of popular myths about trans people, from the ridiculous to the hopeful. There is the ‘born in the wrong body’ trope – as though our real bodies are out there somewhere waiting for us to discover them. So where are they? Are they wandering around with an equally dislocated inhabitant animating…