Jan 17
Let me tell you about a project I once did. I funded it with grant money, which means it must be good, right? The original concept was grand and sweeping: A three-part graphic novel script based on Dante’s Divine Comedy (in my head I imagined all of the issues, bound together as one large and …
Jan 12
When I was a kid, I was a ruiner of lunchboxes. I’d leave them full of tupperware containers for a day, then two…then I’d be afraid to open them because of the scary mold. Then I’d think after a week or so, oh CRAP I’d really better clean out my lunchbox…but the mold is probably …
Nov 07
NaNo Day 5: 500ish words before bedtime. Did the rest of my homework for class, too. Turns out all I want to do on a Friday night is sleep. Does that mean I’m a real adult now? NaNo Day 6: Woke up to write. Wrote. Cleaned the kitchen. Talked to my roommate about fairies. The …
Oct 26
In the late 1700s, a poet named Christopher Smart was put in the looney bin. Why? Because his religious zeal had increased to the point where he was not only praying, frequently and loudly, in the street, but he was forcing random other people to pray with him. They decided to give him a nice …
Oct 17
I roadtripped down to Portland last weekend to attend the Wordstock festival, a gleeful gathering of authors, small presses, and literary folk. I got to also reconnect with some college friends, which was great. It turns out that what we all did with our early twenties involved wandering and writing novels. The conference was a good …
Sep 28
November Girls seems to have come with a soundtrack. Sometimes stories do, sometimes they really, really don’t. Chris Bachelder, my undergrad fiction teacher, used to advise us to “enfold ourselves in silence” in order to write. A lot of time that works best for me. Sometimes music comes of its own accord. I’d spend a …
Sep 25
Note: Revising poems is hard. Never again will I make Spideman Comic strip style promises at the end of blog posts. I think it’s about time you met the main characters of my book. Some of you know them in passing, but I’d like to properly introduce you. PENNY is a delightfully awkward girl. She’s …
Sep 20
Here’s my first go at writing a slow poem: Age Twelve, Sharing a Room With Grammy When you’re old, your hands and feet are blocks of wood. She sits slowly, easing down over calcified knees. Her bent index finger is a post to wrap a shoelace on muscle memory ties the bow, certainly not the …
Aug 29
I was out working in my garden yesterday, trying to get it semi-tidy before the autumn rains set in. I know it’s still August, but the chilly wind and low-angle sunlight made it feel like fall. (Fall and spring have always been my favorite seasons. Thus me moving out to the Pacific Northwest rather than …
Aug 21
Or, some thoughts on time management. I am thinking about times in my life when I’ve worked my ass off. Times when I’ve been pulling ridiculously long days and (mostly) enjoying it. Most of those times involved one or more of the following: 1. college, 2. a theater production, and/or 3. a writing project with …