Snow is lovely, and shoveling can be fun. But I draw the line at storms that dump more snow after one has already cleared it away three times in 24 hours. Just saying. The flakes should stop, at least, while one is actively clearing them away. And DC, for sure, should never need to use [...]
If you are in New York City on Friday, Sept. 11, consider spending the day being mindful of morality. The United Nations will play host to a free all-day conference, open to those who pre-register and sponsored by the Nour Foundation, Georgetown University, and Blackfriars Hall at Oxford University, called “Toward a Common Morality.”
It’s the [...]
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 [...]
A few in the audience for Steven Brown’s lecture “From Mode to Emotion in Musical Communication” here in Washington, D.C., last night weren’t quite ready to receive the conclusions he pitched. Instead of reinforcing our idea that music induces great emotion in the listener, he said, well, maybe we only think it does.
“Briefly stated, music [...]
I love the audio and video courses I get from the Teaching Company; they distract me when I’m exercising and often challenge my preconceptions about history, science and music. But my first one on writing, Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft, also brought up some decades-old and nearly-forgotten anger and resentment.
Turns out there aren’t [...]
Two comments on Saturday struck me. One, at a workshop for apprentice and master fiction writers, from a multi-published writer: Jane Austen is fun to read, and to read in many ways, and to re-read..
but we don’t need to hold ourselves up that high.
She aims for a level that would be fun to read [...]
Here in Washington, DC, we’re dizzy with inauguration. All the social people and the extroverts and the ecstatically inspired are scurrying from event to event, volunteering, singing, chanting, cheering. One could say we’re overrun by the hopeful.
I, too, am inspired and passionate and hopeful and glad, but I’m also staying at home, watching the news [...]
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Posted 18 January 2009
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This year, I will:
• write consistently more than 50 hours per month (12-15 hrs/wk)
• finish 2 submittable books
• build up ideas for 3 new books
• enter 3 RWA-linked writing contests
• volunteer to judge 3 or more writing contests
• continue to volunteer as WRW Web goddess
• attend 2 writing retreats or classes
• read 50 books
• keep [...]
A long weekend, which was to be devoted to free-writing, instead became an occasion to fret and worry about the future.
Almost.
With the goal of 5,000 words a day for the next nine days, and a full-time job, I just can’t afford my usual rumination and recrimination mind-dances. I’m having some success distracting my ruminator with [...]
Someone else in my extended posse might be getting divorced. Breakups of couples and families have been part of my life since I was a toddler; they make a big impression on me, and a new one can sometimes call up the rends and rips from the past.
I know this is partly why I am [...]