Word of the Month-Finished

Who is a writer/author?
I ask this because on a certain network there is a hierarchy. Some writers are authors and some writers are members. In other words, there seems to be this standard of who is or is not considered an author. Being a little too caught up in building my ”platform” I figured I’d give the author thing a try. I have publication credits. I have an mfa. My feature stories and columns have been published for 10 years in a weekly newspaper. I’ve earned state and national awards for my stories and columns. By all accounts I figured that made me an author. Apparently, that’s not enough. I was always under the impression that if I put pen to paper with the in

Score on the publication front
Well, it turns out a little piece I wrote called “The Power of Pebbles” will appear in the forthcoming Cup of Comfort for a Better World. That news came Friday as I was having one crisis after another. My daughter forgot her math book and her scooter, which she needs to get around to her classes, broke. That all meant I had to make an extra trip home and meet a couple deadlines in a few short hours in order to get her scooter in for repairs by 2 p.m. Somewhere in all of that, I managed to find a minute to check my email and see that I ended up among the 49 finalists to have essays in the book. The entire list of contributors is at the

Random line drops from the sky…er…Google
Sometimes phrases or questions or combinations of words just stand out. Today it was the following: “Was it a simple variation of a savory cheese pie?” I think it’s the whole “savory cheese pie” that stood out. I know it’s silly. It just sounds musical to me. Maybe it will find  into a poem or into some piece of fiction. Maybe, I’ve got the start of something. Maybe, it will just stand alone as a line that has dropped from the sky. Well, this one actually dropped from Google. I was randomly searching nothing and found this in a description. Yes, my post screams geek. It’s been raining all day and I just wanted some

It’s going to be a long Monday
John Prine’s lovely little line is coursing through my head this Monday as I spent all day away from home. I woke up at 5:30 p.m., left the house at 7 p.m. and returned home at 9 p.m. In between, there was eight hours of work, just under two hours of dinner out and wait time until the 4-H meeting, which I attended for a half hour before running out to my regular Monday night board meeting that I cover for the newspaper. So, it was a long Monday and there was no work on my novel, but writing was done. Writing is always done. Well, it’s time to move on and grade a few papers.

Another day another morning in the red room
Here I am again, in the early morning silence. The only sound that filters in is the rhythmic gentle thump of the clothes that twirl in the dryer. My golden retriever lies at my feet after having been fed and let outside. I’ve surfed some blogs and drink tea in the peace. I don’t care that dust has collected. I’m writing, even if it is only here in my blog for the time being. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m reading Tillie Olsen’s book Silences. In it she writes, “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Ne