research process

In case you’re one of the few people who’ve managed to miss my news, THE TESTAMENT OF HAROLD’S WIFE is coming out September 25 from Kensington Books. I thought you might enjoy the real-life stories that gave life to this novel. There were two completely different experiences that planted the seeds. The first had to […]

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 […]

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 […]

One thing I’ve learned is that most of us are passionate about a couple of things and how much those interests emerge as defining parts of our identities. I don’t know exactly when I fell in love with being able to identify, for example, the wildflowers that right now have turned the forest floor into […]

To those readers in winter-affected areas: is the weather making everything feel like extra work to you? It is to me. Just getting dressed is a shivering labor involving long underwear under my jeans, a fleece over my shirt, wool socks as thick as my thumb. Preparing to actually leave the house, say to walk Hannah? […]

I’m going to try to make a case that Dr. Mark Fischer of the College of Mt. St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, is normal, and it’s going to be hard. Working against me is the fact that he’s a brilliant professor of physics. Also a researcher, he teams with eminent colleagues like chemist Dr. Diana […]