When I made the decision to be a writer, I scheduled writing time. I had one hour to be a writer, noon to one which was the hour my baby daughters took naps. When they started nursery school and then went into kindergarten I had three hours to write every morning. When they hit grade…
Sometimes we forget why we write. The work is so hard, it’s so difficult to make a living doing it, and then there are those thickets of doubt we have to wade through on the way to our pen or computer. Are we any good at it? Why break our hearts over this impossible…
The hardest post of all to write. R. died on February 10th, 2015. Many of you already knew this. I wrote his obituary which was in the L.A. Times on 2/19 and 2/21, and in the N.Y.T. the following Sunday. The best lines came from our friend Tom who wrote to me that R. was…
Though life is filled with the clunky vocabulary of medicine and nursing these days ( G tube, syringes, flushing, ambulate et al) occasionally I hear a word or phrase that turns me on. For instance this morning R’s visiting nurse said to me, “He could get intoxicated by water if you use too much.” Intoxicated…
Staying with someone in a hospital is like being on a plane. Time seems to have a different shape. Sleeping is awkward. Old newspapers pile up. You talk to strangers at odd hours, intimately, in the dark. R.’s bed has an inflatable mattress. About every 15 minutes it cranks up with air which sounds like…
Remodeling a house is a surefire excuse not to work on your novel. I know this, have known it ever since I remodeled a very neglected little cottage in Hermosa Beach twenty-four years ago. And then spent almost three years on our house in Santa Monica, and just two years ago restored one desperate little…
This is a picture of my head. Let me start with the easy part: 26 people are coming for Easter brunch. This will be fun and already is organized with my ‘race to Costco for food’ menu. I’ll take pictures for my cooking blog and post them on The Intimidated Cook. But the other part…
I used to make a lot of snarky comments about Facebook, comparing it to Junior High and only good for one thing – marketing. But finally I'm starting to get it – it feels more like hanging out with other writers in a coffee shop rather than school. I used to just post Marketing Whore…
In 1974 my friend Cy saw an ad in the San Diego Union travel section that said: "Travel anywhere Greyhound goes for a full month for a flat fee!" He had been trying to figure out a family vacation for that summer of the gas crisis and here it was. So he bought an "Ameripass"…
Dominique Browning wrote a thought-provoking essay in Sunday's New York Times (10/2/11) called "Burning the Evidence" – about pitching forty years of her diaries into a blazing fire. (Link below.) What to do with your diaries/journals is a questions all writers ask themselves. I threw out my teenage diary with its pink plastic cover, useless…
