Some of you will remember me talking about the memoir I was writing. Maybe you even remember reading the excerpts I shared as the project progressed. Maybe you noticed I became strangely silent about it for a long time. Maybe you didn’t notice, because a lot of things disappeared in…

My family of origin was one of tight-lidded secrets, and I never knew why. I only knew that most information was off-limits, including family history stuff. It remains a mystery to this day why in my childhood our aunt and uncle suddenly stopped their weekly visits to our house and…

No one knew him as an author. A small handful of close family and friends served as beta readers even as he wrote his first book, but few others. Only when his book was written did he start talking publicly about how he had written a novel — one he…

The REAL reason book launching sucks sometimes… You published a book. Even went to the effort of launching it into the world (brave soul) And then the launch sucked, sales were nil, and you were left wondering, “what did I do wrong?” I’ve got good news for you. More than…

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by life — and not necessarily always in a bad way, either. There’s just SO MUCH I want to do, taste, try, enjoy, experience. …

One of the single most barriers to writing is a lack of time. Life is busy with kids, jobs, shopping, laundry, car repairs, errands, your second evening job as a cabbie for your teens in the evenings… it’s just a lot. And let’s not forget the emotional demands that can…

Welcome to the dark side where love, though it twists and gnarls in the shadows like a sun-thirsty vine, searching and stretching for light, still thrives. The novel A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews is a story in which each page is colored with shadows of death as the main…

I’ve often wondered over the years what the point of writing prompts are. They didn’t seem that practical, especially when there were other things I’d rather write. The first writing prompt I ever recall doing was to write a scene from the perspective of a doorknob. My first thought was…

Writer’s Block — what is it? And, more importantly, how does one move past it and finally become able to write? Is Writer’s Block simply the inability to write? Is it a lack of enjoyment of writing? …