It’s been an astonishing day for writing. I’d given it up for a bit, seeped myself in photographs, paid some bills, and now find myself longing for words, a desire that has built into an urgency. I can thank Colette for her early morning inspiration in the form of her short story The Hollow Nut. [...]

I’m saying it here first, before I tell another living soul. Baby Dust is done. I wrote the last sentence two minutes ago. I’ll update you all more on what is going to happen next later, but I’m sitting here bawling my eyes out and the ending worked out better than I thought it could, as [...]

I had to write 50,000 words of a new novel in November. And I did! You readers out there should all do it next year. It’s fun! www.nanowrimo.org

I have been so struggling with this. I’ve played with babies and angels and mothers and wombs and sorrow and birth and all sort of words. I have pages of combinations but they all came off as too television drama, or nonfiction sounding, or just plain overblown. This morning I lay in bed, stressing over [...]

Despite a foray at the Ren Fair this weekend and a killer photo schedule, I managed to get back on pace for my 50,000 words in November. The book is going well although chapter two did falter for a while (I started over completely last night), and readership is high over at the novel blog. [...]

I realized earlier today that I should have heard the results of the Abilene Writer’s Guild contest by now, so I surfed over to their page, assuming I had lost but seeing if any of my friends who had entered had won. I was quite surprised to learn my novel Helena the Muse had won [...]

So last night we went to Stephanie Klein’s book signing at BookPeople. Stephanie was funny and spirited, much as I expected. You could definitely see her “bump”–she’s five months along with twins! She talked about how when she started her blog, she never expected success to follow, and attributed the popularity and the book deals [...]

So everyone who’s been around me since Monday knows I’ve been laid pretty low by the whole Memoirs of a Muse discovery, a newly published book eerily similar to the one I just finished writing. Today I finally felt like I was coming out of it. I appreciate Henry and Ivy, who put up with [...]

As a child, I exalted the library as a veritable heaven of the imagination. Golden light blazed through small round windows and shafted onto stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Beverly Clearly, Judy Blume and EB White. My mom would only take me once every two weeks, when the books were due, as it was [...]

I have good parking karma. When my mom was in town last weekend, still very sick and weak and unable to walk long distances, I got a front row spot, and I mean the very FRONT spot, at every single store we visited–four of them one afternoon. Mom was aghast. “This is Austin,” she said, [...]