Found this video over at videosift.com: It really fires up around the :25 mark, but watching the whole thing reminds me how much we move around when we are “sleeping quietly.” The video credit on videosift is “by Perky,” on YouTube it’s “derrobsi.” Here’s where I found it: http://videosift.com/video/Time-lapse-man-sleeping-with-cat I wandered across it because I [...]
(This post by me first appeared on the Dana Foundation blog; lots of other great stuff is there, too!) Making the point that mental illness is a matter for all families, award-winning actress Glenn Close was joined by her sister Jessie and a nephew to give a joint public lecture at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org
