the writing life

Are you hanging on by your last frayed nerve as you slog through the dregs of winter? I know it well: the March vagaries of a couple of days in the sixties that bring daffodil shoots above ground reaching for the sun, teenagers in shorts and T shirts flocking like birds, kids wobbling around on Christmas bikes, happy dogs taking their humans on long walks. Fooled again, suckers that we all are, the next day or the next week, of course, comes another “winter storm,” with sleet

Have you ever had a string of days in which everything goes totally, weirdly blooey? I’m definitely not talking about the unbearable losses that most of us suffer at some point now. I’m talking about those times when you’d swear some evil genie had set up your schedule like a very long line of dominos […]

Thank you, thank you to those readers whose comment included a life lesson I can draw from our experience with Cassie! I have contacted each of the seven winners to offer his/her choice of my available books, OR, also available, A Matter of Mercy, coming out on August 6, about which I will proceed to […]

I think most people have probably had a year here or there that was just really rough. 2019 has been that way for my family. My husband had prostate cancer (successfully treated, I’m thankful to say), quickly followed by a hip replacement, then his opposite knee had to be replaced. Those of you who have […]

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 […]

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 […]

This happened before the election, when I wasn’t so worried about the country. My daughter and son-in-law claimed they still have only a three-year old girl and a six-year old boy, but they lied. They suddenly have nine kids, maybe more. I know this because my husband and I spent several days taking care of […]

I have spent all morning lying in the sunshine on the floor with Hannah the Lab, knowing it’s our last morning together. She can’t get to her feet by herself anymore. It came on fairly suddenly last week, this final diminishment. My husband and I can see that it’s confusing and upsetting her to be lifted to […]

I haven’t done a blog post in a long time, and a few people have been kind to mention that they’ve missed them. It’s not that I’ve forgotten. Life has interfered with my getting much work done. During late summer we had some minor (ha!) renovations done to our house. The decision to start renovations […]

Lately I have sounded a lot like my father in his last years, when he was in his nineties. I breathe heavily when I move. Rising from a chair requires grunting with exertion. Then there’ll be a series of thuds as I grab the handles of a walker and bump my way around corners or […]

I’m chagrined that I missed Banned Books Week at the end of September. Normally I’d celebrate by buying as many as I can afford from an independent book store, but I was busy babysitting my two-year-old grandson while my daughter and son-in-law went on a four day trip. This may not sound like a big deal to someone who hasn’t done […]

I was recently asked by the editors of a small press to write my life story in six words and to “Be as pithy as possible.” Seriously. After fooling with this task for a completely ridiculous amount of time, choosing, discarding, and switching up the order of words, I grasped how revealing it is to do this. I […]

This one is easy. Writers need to exercise because they spend way too much time sitting, usually with bad posture, usually in bad chairs. At least this writer does. So after my little chiropractic adventure (see last post) I decided to listen to my brother-in-law, the orthopedic surgeon who seems to think that better exercise could […]

The most profound insight I’ve reached lately is that a writer needs an excellent chair. Much better than the one I have, which I’m pretty sure is causing my back pain. (Another possible cause is watching TV while yielding most of the couch to a self-centered Labrador retriever. Hannah’s insistence on proximity to me for her after-dinner coma forces me to drape […]

Sometimes we don’t know what’s on our minds until we wake from a dream in a dark room. This is especially true for me when I’m working on a first draft, living a story in my head as I set down rows of words and take most of them back. Last night I dreamed of watching our car fall into a […]

Sometimes I remind myself of the Don Quixote of our yard. He’s a lunatic robin doing valiant battle through this long and glorious spring. I can’t believe he hasn’t killed himself yet. When morning is only a soft charcoal suggestion, he begins flying into the first window in which his reflection becomes visible, fighting off a ubiquitous rival in his territory. He keeps at 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 […]