generating material/sources

Nancy’s husband sent a picture two days before she died. In that one, she wore a white sleeveless nightgown. Her grown sons leaned over either side of her, a hospice tray with a cup of applesauce in the foreground. She was sleeping. Perhaps she’d slipped into the mercy of a coma. Nancy Johnson Pinard was […]

I’m thrilled to introduce you to my new novel, A MATTER OF MERCY, published August 1. This one has so much of my heart in it. Set in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, it began when I became friends with one of the oyster farmers, Barbara Austin, whom I met while walking the beach at low tide. She was working […]

I love control. If everyone—including my dog—would only do what I tell them, it would put the fun back in dysfunctional and (my) life would go so much more smoothly. Let’s include objects too, so my computer would stop being a butthead. Ditto my iphone 5s, and Siri, who clearly has a learning problem. Oh, it […]

My 97 year old father-in-law has always said, “One boy is one boy but two boys are half a boy.” He doubtless developed this theory because he had two sons 18 months apart. After five years of that fiasco, he and his wife must have been desperate to improve the balance of civilizing forces (add a girl) because they tried again. Apparently, they wisely […]

Have you ever tried to do what you were pretty sure was the right thing only to have it explode? Even have two other seemingly sane and intelligent people tell you yes, you should do it before you went ahead and did that thing that exploded? So here’s the story. It was Saturday’s chilly dusk and I was driving home. I’d reached my own quiet […]

No fault of the chicken gynecologist’s, but Meg didn’t make it. She’d seemed much better shortly after the stuck egg removal by Nik and bathtub treatment by Diana, but then she worsened steadily over the next couple of days. Desperate stabs at word combinations on Google finally yielded a diagnosis that perfectly matched her symptoms: […]

Here’s another story about the urban chickens. I have to admit that research for the next novel is accumulating much faster and more conveniently than material for the one I’m currently writing. On which I should be concentrating. But we’re in the first crisis with Diana’s girls, and Nik (her British husband, once renowned for his dedication to reading […]

Everyone’s heard the line, “Write about what you know.” If I only wrote about what I know, I’d have run dry years ago. It’s learning a subject that I’ve stumbled on and become fascinated with, and discovering how it fits with a story idea in my head that keeps me at it. So my obsession with Diana’s chickens is surely leading […]

It turns out that those monster thighs and herding tendencies that Amy, Diana’s chicken, was developing made a lot of sense. You didn’t even have to notice the red comb on top of her head; Amy cleared her throat and let out the first crows right after Diana and her husband Nik returned from England. […]

I think everyone is due an update on my friend Diana’s urban chickens, aka the world’s easiest research. My blog post of May 13 introduced the chicks (Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy) when Diana was beginning to wonder if Amy might be, oops, really an Amos. Recall that hens are perfectly welcome within city limits. […]

Given my love for the natural world, I hit the jackpot when my dear friend Diana lost her mind and brought home four baby chicks in early April. I immediately recognized that I’ll gleefully use chicken-raising in a novel (definitely in an urban setting, too; Diana and her husband live within the city limits and […]