My maternal grandmother died earlier this week, only days after her 103rd birthday. She was a long-distance grandma, but reliable, and she loved sending and receiving letters, which meant I practiced writing from an early age. This is my favorite childhood photo of Grandma Helen, sharing one of our favorite things to do–reading. I also [...]
So, after a sluggish start and some mild howling about the first draft of my Manchester story, I managed to build a weekend’s-full of space to get down to reorganizing and shaping this behemoth.
This is the revised sentence-for-scene outline, all 15.5 pages of it. It took me 17 hours over two days and the night [...]
So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling.
But I have never thought that traits that are [...]
I found Salman Rushdie’s breakout novel all it was cracked up to be, though it did take me about 50 pages to fully commit. It is dense and circular, eschews some common internal punctuation, and has a fantastic story bedded in sharp detail and joy in the wordsmithing. For a dense book, I read it [...]
So, in clearing the decks for National Novel Writing Month, I’m crash-reading NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, and, no surprise, it’s not working. Gaskell’s writing demands a slow read, tasting all her clear phrases and cogent observations. And I know I said this earlier about MARY BARTON, but it reads so darn modern, I [...]
In what is building into a series of wild word-joy novels of oppression, the bookclub I’m part of followed up THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS by Isabel Allende with THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, by Junot Díaz. I read this book, with its geek-speak, footnotes, multiple somewhat-unreliable narrators and real-life magic in two [...]
I just finished Charlotte Bronte’s SHIRLEY, which makes reference to mills, their owners and workers and strikers, in 1811-1812. I started it to learn about the history and thinking of that time, to use as reference for my new story, but ended up caught up in the story and the original yet universal characters. At [...]
So I’m working up a new story, and thinking I’ll do a big scene around Peterloo, a mass meeting in Manchester, England, in 1819 that was bloodily dispersed by ill-trained, sabre-wielding near-vigilantes. I don’t usually think much about protesting for social change, beyond the latest march on Washington, but lately it seems like that’s all [...]
Perfect vacation afternoon: Sitting in a lawn chair at the edge of Grand Traverse Bay, sipping a cappuccino and reading a book during the break between films at the Traverse City Film Festival.
Here’s some of us waiting to get in.
Here’s about half of the floor. Sales totaled more than $60,000, all for charity.