As promised, send me your poetry (Haiku) and I will post it. The surprising and delightful thing is I received poetry from all ages and from as far away as India and Argentina. It’s only fitting that we begin with one from the master.
Untitled (Bashô, Japan)
the first cold shower;
even the monkey seems to want
a little coat of straw.
To enjoy life… (María del Carmen Chiappero, Argentina)
The lovely sun shines,
the wind blows by the window,
an old sweet song sounds.
With a melody,
Many melancholy words
leave a deep meaning.
We´re “dust in the wind”.
We´re all part of this giant big world,
but we´re very small.
Not too long ago I heard from a dear friend that she was battling breast cancer and undergoing chemo. In response to this life threatening disease, she thumbed her nose at the cancer, shaved her head, and celebrated her new reality. She also began a blog to chronicle her journey. http://jodeenrevere.wordpress.com/ The blog is a beautiful combination of memories, loves, losses, family lost and regained, life threatening challenges, gratitude, the shining eyes of a child, of a dog, beautiful new human beings coming in and out of our lives.
This post is particularly for my Jodeen of the brave heart. The boiled down, scraped down, bone- raw condition of the human experience. All of it is why I will take every day (good or bad) and squeeze every bit of juice out of it.
She has come out the other side, a different woman in some ways, a new improved version of the other woman before.
A perfect time to celebrate our women who have survived and thrived!!!
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month!
DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS!
In addition to my twice weekly blog I also feature an interview with another author once a month. So come along with me; we shall sneak into these writers’ special places, be a fly on the wall and watch them create! Barbara Delinsky and Elizabeth Hoyt will be my October authors.
To receive my posts sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Thanks!
Part 2: Continuing with this look into best selling author, Barbara Delinsky’s world:
Book signing
Q. What makes a writer great?
A. Not fancy prose or even extensive research. I believe that a writer is great when she can produce book after book that readers love.
Q. and the all important: What does the process of going from “no book” to “finished book” look like?
A. Discipline. That’s it, short and sweet. Produce three pages each day before allowing yourself to leave the computer, and you will eventually finish a book. Do I start with an outline? Vaguely. But it’s sketchy and subject to change as the book grows and characters take over.
Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?
A. Given that my books are character-driven, my characters come to me at the very start. That said, I don’t fully know them until I’m nearly halfway through the book. This is good. By not boxing them into a preconceived notion of who or what they should be, they take off on their own and do things I may not have planned. Those things are often what make the book shine.
TS. I have been reading Barbara Delinsky for decades! Good, rich stories about believable and appealing people. Since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, what better time to promote her stellar book, UPLIFT!
Now for the Interview I have been waiting years for:
Q. Where do you write? Do you have a special room, shed, barn, special space for your writing? Or tell us about your ‘dream’ work space.
A. I have an office over our garage, with windows front and back and four skylights. This makes it bright and sets it apart from the rest of the house.
Q. Do you have any special rituals when you sit down to write? (a neat work space, sharpened #2 pencils, legal pad, cup of tea, glass of brandy, favorite pajamas, etc.)
A. I have no rituals. My desk may or may not be neat, depending on where I am in my book, and I may have tea or a soda or water nearby, depending on my mood. I actually like to vary things when it comes to my writing space and habits. Keeps me fresh.
Q. Could you tell us something about yourself that we might not already know?
A. Growing up, I was no reader. I much preferred playing outside to reading inside. Going through high school and college, I read few books that weren’t required for school. It was only when my children were young and I needed an escape from full-time motherhood that I began to really read.
Q. Do you have a set time each day to write or do you write only when you are feeling creative?
A. I am usually working at my computer by six in the morning, Monday through Friday. Creativity? Some days it’s there, some days not, but I work nonetheless. If what I produce one day is bad, I either edit it the next or ditch it. I do believe that inspiration is 90% perspiration.
Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?
A. Limit your time at the computer. Two hours a day are better than none. Keep at those two hours, day after day, and you’ll eventually have something to show.
Q. Do you ‘get lost’ in your writing and for how long?
A. No. I don’t ‘get lost.’ I cut my teeth as a writer when I had three young sons at home. I stole writing time when they were napping and, eventually, at school. Given that they were my first priority, ‘getting lost’ was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
Q. Who or what is your “Muse” at the moment ?
A. Bloomingdale’s. I tell myself that if I produce something worthwhile at my computer in the morning, I can run to the mall that afternoon.
Q. When did you begin to write seriously?
A. I was thirty-four and starting to look for part-time work when I noticed a piece in the morning paper about women who wrote category novels. They made it sound easy and very do-able while raising a family, so I decided to give it a shot.
Q. How long after that were you published?
A. I spent two months reading the kind of novel I wanted to write, wrote my own in three weeks, sent it to various publishing houses, and got a bid for it six weeks later. I was lucky. I happened to deliver the right manuscript to the right editor at the right time. If I were to do it over again, I might not be as lucky.
Don’t Miss it! Part 2 of this fascinating writer’s life coming on October 9th.
DON’T MISS UPCOMING BLOGS featuring INTERVIEWS with best-selling AUTHORS!
In addition to my twice weekly blog I also feature an interview with another author once a month. So come along with me; we shall sneak into these writers’ special places, be a fly on the wall and watch them create! Barbara Delinsky and Elizabeth Hoyt will be my October authors.
To receive my posts sign up for my On the home page, enter your email address. Thanks!
It was just a few short years ago that being self published was a dirty word. People would call your work a ‘vanity book’ or a ‘one book wonder’. You would have to warehouse 10’s of thousands of inventory for your book and then schlep it around as far as you could. All of that is in the past!We can hold our heads up high, write our work and get it in the hands of our readers for, sometimes, as little as a few hundred bucks. If you don’t hire a graphic designer for the cover, then publishing is literally FREE.
Now here’s the “Good Company” I claimed………….
How Beatrix Potter self-published Peter Rabbit
The aspiring children’s writer was fed up of receiving rejection letters – so on this day in 1901 she self-published a certain book about a naughty rabbit
One of my favorite shows on a lazy Sunday morning is (appropriately) CBS Sunday Morning. One segment was about the invention of emoticons. (8>) In the interview Dr. Fahlman stated that in the early days of inter-office email (imagine that!) none of his colleagues got “my wicked sarcastic humor. So I made up this smiley face so that they would know when I was joking.” (:-D
Since the dawn of communication between man there have been many symbols, codes and punctuation used to communicate emotions and feelings difficult to represent through text. Early examples can be seen in Morse code abbreviations from the 1850’s and print publications in the early 1900’s.
There is no clear date as to when the first emoticon was used nor is it clear who really invented the first emoticon. It is however generally accepted that the common sideways smiley face in use today was invented by Scott Fahlman in 1982.
On the morning of September 19, 1982, the use of the first smiley face and frowning face emoticons was proposed by research professor Scott E. Fahlman, from the department of computer science at the Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. In 2002, this claim was verified after the original back-up tapes containing the postings were retrieved by Jeff Baird. (8>(Continue reading “The History of the ’emoticon’ (8>D”
So many of you have asked how I can be so prolific in my fiction, how I maintain a blog twice a week and interview other authors too. So maybe it would be fun for you if I wrote once in awhile about what I’m doing…..I’m calling it Everything but theKITCHEN SINK because I’m throwing everything into the pot ……..no rhyme or reason.
This week I have the great pleasure to review Peter May’s latest book “The Lewis Man” during his book tour in the US.Saturday my blog will begin my interview with him and he has been so generous with his time and writing processes.
One of my favorite posts coming is how the (; ) smiley face was created back in 1982. After some research I found the original email that first featured these emoticons.
Don’t know if you remember or not, but a few years ago I spent 10 days in Argentina at the invitation of two young professors and their university, National University of Villa María . They teach English (through action) there. The families of Mariana, Marta, and Fiorella hosted me in their homes with dinners, lunches, and Continue reading “Everything but the Kitchen Sink~~(new series) Diary of a Mad Writer!”
Q. How do you get from ‘finished’ book from ‘no book’? (continued)
A. When I am happy with my outline, I can see what and where I still need to research. I make a list of all the locations in the story and I make a point of visiting every one of them. A sense of place is very important in my books, whether it is France, China, or the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I never write about a place if I haven’t been there. I like to go and take video of the locations, making notes about what sort of things strike you when you are there – the heat, or cold, the smells etc.
When I get back from my location research I will make a short video of each location that I can replay when I am writing the scenes that are set there. Sometimes visiting the locations will cause me to have to change the story outline. I make any changes necessary, then I am ready to write.
Writing the actual book is probably the most difficult and least enjoyable part of the process. I want to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. I adopt a very strict routine that absolutely nothing is allowed to interfere with.
I get up at 6 am, take my breakfast to my desk, Continue reading “My Interview with international best selling author, Peter May (part 3)”
More from Charles Bukowski……..His insight is pure truth but who among us would think in quite this way? Never a glass far from his hand, never a woman far from his arm, never a stubby pencil far from his fingers, never a cat not winding its way around his legs, never many days going by without watching the horses race…the genius wrote and wrote and then wrote some more… and very little of it was false. A lot of his humor was cloaked in irony if you look very closely.
What’s with you middle-aged men who give up? Just when the door of freedom is opening. Free to do what you want and ignore the rest, freedom from putting up with a–holes, freedom to NOT set the alarm clock. Freedom to start on your bucket list.
You might say, ‘Trish, you’re being a little harsh. You don’t know what he was going through.” YEAH, I DO and I’m harsh because it’s such a damn waste of life and living. And because my middle-aged man took his own life so I’m an expert on the devastation, guilt and grief that suicide leaves behind! I am more than a little pissed off at Robin for leaving us…his fans. And I know exactly what his wife and family are going through. The worst being that there are so many unanswered questions. I was one of the lucky ones who got answers. Did they make me feel any better, NO.…
her authors too. So maybe it would be fun for you if I wrote once in awhile about what I’m doing…..I’m calling it Everything but the KITCHEN SINK because I’m throwing everything into the pot ……..no rhyme or reason.
