A Novel Idea

I’ve just come from an hour-long meeting with the last official “reader” of a spiral-bound copy of the manuscript.  And I still have goosebumps. After two years of feedback from regulars in a writers’ group, I decided to ask nine more to weigh in on the story as well:  family members who also are bona [...]

There have been all kinds of cosmic nudges to keep me going.  At a point of frustration, when I was struggling with the ending of my book, for instance,  a Facebook link showed up on a friend’s status report.  It took me to J.K. Rowling’s website.  I found biographical notes chronicling her early struggle, her [...]

In the past week I have climbed aboard the State Fair Midway ride called the X-TREME and lived to tell about it, decades older than anybody else who dared to ride.  Also played hide-and-seek with 6-year-old Ryder, the two of us hiding from our moms under the giant hosta leaves at the arboretum. (That’s me [...]

“We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.” Vaclav Havel I’m thinking about novelist Jose Saramago today.  He published his first few novels in his 20s and then stopped writing fiction for the next 30 years.  He said,  “That was maybe one of [...]

Tuck is my wonder dog.  Tuck is my honey dog.  He is also the inspiration for the dog of the same name in the novel.  At the moment, half the advance readers of the draft feel he needs to die for a number of reasons I won’t go into here.  The other half feel as [...]

I’m jazzed about Kai’s design for my book-related letterhead and second page. (The header for A Novel Idea is a variation of the letterhead.)  I love these worn sneakers –  not the shelltoes or Air Force Ones that b-girls and b-boys swear by — but  riders that have done their share of fancy footwork, nonetheless.  [...]

Kai says he finished reading the manuscript at 5 in the morning.  Liv says she picks it up every chance she gets and is almost done.  She tells me it is an important book.    My wonderful, wonderful grown kids.  Life partner, Pete, declares that this work will make a big difference in the world. One [...]

Good grief.  After listening to two hours of talk radio regarding the power of intention — on Get Real Girls, the weekly 107.1 FM show co-hosted by Liv Lane and Colleen Lindstrom — I felt so inspired that I went right to my laptop.  Within seconds, I’d entered a Facebook status report about an intention [...]