Are we all, as the cliché goes, the star of our own show? In a sense yes. I think we’re at least a major player—the active protagonist or the observant narrator. Some people have more exciting stories (lives) in the sense that they are celebrities, leaders, notable figures in their fields, or notorious for something terrible—like a crime or a scandal. No one wants to be a bit player in the story of their own life, so we’re all stars.             I remember conversations many years ago about reincarnation. Everyone thought their past lives were stellar. If you imagined your
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Much of who I am is non-standard. My ethnic (kinky/curly) hair. My height. My shoe size. My career choices. The values I inherited from my parents and so much more… Growing up in a philosophically non-standard family heightened my awareness of the general defaults in society and in storytelling, too. Books, films, and TV shows are full of stock characters and standard scenarios. I’m not saying that these cliched plot turns don’t create good stories, I’m just saying that familiarity can breed both comfort and contempt—from saccharine Christmas miracles and femme fatales to waking up in bed with the corpse
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I’m not a gambler. I find the idea weird and intriguing in a story, but in real life I just don’t get it. I’ve played penny Poker (in college) and my mom taught us how to play blackjack on a rainy day at a beach house in my childhood when beach houses didn’t have TVs—let alone a myriad of portable entertainment devices. In general, I think being a writer, being a single woman, dancing Tango, investing in the stock market, and living in New York City is enough risk for me.             Because I’m home recovering from Covid (yup, it’s
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Artists often wonder about “doing too much.” A painter might have the habit of second guessing and adding just another and then another and then another touch of paint until the original lines—the actual strokes of genius with a brush—are buried and blurred in second thoughts. One too many chips in that piece of marble and instead of getting the perfect profile, the subject might lose his nose! I know I’m being silly right now, but there’s a little bit of serious business buried in my over-painted, over-carved, meandering analogy. How do you know how to end a story? Sometimes
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I’ve been having amazing conversations with people about WHERE we are right now in this pandemic adventure and WHEN we are heading toward something closer to the pre-pandemic normal life that all of us long for in our own ways. The conversations are revelatory—in the sense that they are huge billboard-like signposts illustrating the priorities, fears, and hopes of individuals. These conversations don’t answer my personal questions, but they are the building blocks of character. We are what we dream. The limitations imposed by the pandemic put priorities into perspective. We’re all asking ourselves, “Is this what we really want
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I’m back, but this time I’m asking questions. I took some time off from blogging to ponder what’s next. What’s next for me in fiction? What’s next for me in my freelance writing work? What’s next for me in LIFE? And the more I pondered—the more time and space I gave myself to wonder what’s next—the more I questioned everything. All my expectations, plans, and desires were suddenly peppered with question marks. Everything is up in the air. I’m back, but I’m still asking questions and we’ll see where this new approach takes me. I could abandon it and reboot
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In the past few weeks, I’ve had some interesting conversations with old friends. In one case my personal recollections of being painfully shy and forever in the background turned out to be a bit out of sync with how they remembered me. It was true that I wasn’t as involved as they were in that group of people (job related) because I was still finishing my degree and I was tightly connected with my university friends. But I wasn’t as invisible as I’d imagined. The crowd at work came from far and wide and bonded. I saw myself on the
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Now that I’m back in the land of the living—or closer to normal life in the city I call home—I’m out and about interacting with many more people. I’m noticing an uptick in mean-spirited thoughts. I’ve caught myself hoping that the guy riding his bike on the sidewalk (not Okay if you’re over the age of 12) would fall off his bike before he rolls over a dog’s paws or crashes into a pedestrian. At a museum exhibit opening party, I caught myself thinking, “did she really need to wear that?” And, when I desperately needed a coffee in a
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Halloween means different things at different times. This year, as New York City emerges from its Covid cocoon, it means a return to normalcy. The Greenwich Village Parade is ON! Last year, the huge explosion of silly fun, clever costumes, and intense crowds that flow onto side streets all over the general area that includes SoHo, NoHo, the East Village, The West Village, Union Square, Chelsea, and Flatiron districts was reduced to a “rerun” of the 2019 parade, via a video presentation on a local cable TV station. It felt sad. And Halloween should never be sad. For some people
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Very early this morning I finished reading an excellent mystery by Val McDermid. She’s a great storyteller! I read it with gusto after having slogged through another British mystery by an author who shall remain nameless here. Let’s just say his series is heavily promoted on Amazon and I got sucked in by the book’s location, Whitby. As a diehard Dracula fan, I couldn’t resist it in the run-up to Halloween.          Comparing the two books is unfair. But the exercise of identifying some of those differences was fun. McDermid’s intricate plot rolled seamlessly out of a cast of multi-dimensional
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