I’ve been AWOL from this blog. I’ve been losing weight. I’ve had sleepless nights. I’ve lost my temper and more… So much of my life and my time have been swallowed up in the twin real estate sagas, of renovating the new place and selling the current apartment.          How did this become an all-consuming process?          The pandemic didn’t help. It halted construction right after demolition, leaving me with a place that couldn’t move forward, but could drift backwards—with rain and snow leaking through the tenuous roof.          But the strangest chapters in this saga started when work began
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I read the entire book. I didn’t like it, but… I felt compelled to figure out why I disliked it so much. It was an interesting process and, I don’t think I’d have had the patience for it in a non-pandemic time. The premise was intriguing and that was the justification for buying the book—a walled off room in a house. For me that has echoes of Jane Eyre with the wife up in the attic. But this was a contemporary cozy mystery; and the protagonist/amateur detective is a “house flipper” and since my life is all wrapped up in
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When I’m putting words into the mouths of characters, I often pause and search for the right words to write. Not my right words—the words I’d use—but the character’s right words. Characters in fiction have vocabularies, in the same way their real-life counterparts have verbal default words, a penchant for multi-syllabic erudite words, or a minimalist speaking style that makes them appear to be mysterious and wise.          This hit me over the head while I was reading ‘Searching for Sylvie Lee,’ the new novel by Jean Kwok. The story-line jumps along a couple of timelines and is told in
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I’m not asking about the big things that we all talk about—missing friends and family. Or about the individual gaps in all our lives that we complain about or long for on a daily basis. We’re all sharing those lists in conversations: “I miss Broadway.” “I miss live music.” “I miss dancing.” “I miss traveling, dining out, family holiday parties, first kisses… I miss going to school in person!”          No, I’m not asking to hear your list of BIG misses, I want to learn about the little, unexpected, additions to your list that have been added now that the
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Right now, we all need to listen to doctors, nurses, scientists and public health officials about the pandemic. I got a mini lesson that reminded me, not for the first time, that listening to health professionals—taking their advice seriously—has consequences large and small.          This is one of those small lessons. One the reminds me of how often I yell at characters in fiction when they do foolish things, like go down to the dark basement holding a flashlight with an almost dead battery or failing to lock the car door or leaving their drink unattended on the bar or…
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The package doesn’t arrive. The call doesn’t come. No text appears on your phone. You can assume there’s a minor glitch or go directly to the ‘dark side’ and imagine worst case scenarios.          Imagining bad, crazy bad, and even horrific sequences of events is part of writing fiction. What if door isn’t stuck? ‘What if it’s been locked from the other side?’ Can be the start of a pretty scary story. Mystery, horror, science fiction, and adventure are often premised around a serious deviation in the norm. Right now, when there is so much pandemic bad news every day,
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The advice to “write what you know” has some validity. If you know nothing about life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920’s it’s a bad choice for setting a story. But if you write ONLY what you know personally, you’ll need to be an exceptionally interesting person to come up with more than a few stories. For me, writing what I know is a combination of what I’ve experienced, what I’ve researched and what I’ve imagined. The last one is critical as it combines emotional and intellectual responses of my own with what I’ve observed first-hand
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For the last few years, I’ve made a point of wishing my friends a Happy & Healthy New Year. Perhaps it was the time I spent taking care of my aging parents or maybe it was my growing awareness of the importance of HEALTH in all things? But right now—as the northern hemisphere heads toward a dark, cold period of months, lightened only by progress of vaccines; and the southern hemisphere dives into a summer when the mandate of staying socially distant argues with our natural inclination to have fun in the sun together—I’m wishing everyone good health and patience.
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Comfort food is a big deal right now. The world is crazy so have a big helping of something that makes you feel comforted—if not entirely comfortable. “Comfort Food” often leaves the eater uncomfortably over-stuffed. That extra large bowl of Mac ‘n Cheese, the triple scoop of ice cream, or a big plate of fries might go down easy, but they have consequences. We all have things we love to eat that don’t love us back. It’s who we are. And that brings me to what our favorite comfort foods say about us. Food as an insight into character, lifestyle,
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