Serenity… an expedition

I have a story to tell. It’s about the day I went across the street to the convenience store to get milk and walked right into a… well, I’m still not sure what to call it. Maybe you have a name for it. A gift, anyway, it was. When I came out of the store [...]

For someone who plans on writing novels, I have an odd problem; fear of fiction. Or, I guess, fear of writing fiction, because I quite like reading it. When I was very young I wrote stories all the time, and sometimes even illustrated them. The older I grew, though, the less I wrote and the [...]

I wanted to write. And to finish what I wrote. That’s why I started these online classes last fall, so that I would learn to be structured a bit, have deadlines to meet and actually get things done.  (graphic from here) So far, that’s working out well, for classes anyway. While grades don’t mean much [...]

I used the wrong analogy in a previous post.  Influenced, I would say, by the extensive – and difficult to overcome – training most Americans receive from birth,  when I sat down to write about the “show me your papers” law recently passed in Arizona I proceeded to lazily stumble onto the same well-worn track [...]

I’m sitting in the food court of my local mall right now, my laptop at a comfortable height on the table and the booth providing good support for my back. There is a bit of music in the background – easy listening, as they call it, that is very easy to not listen to, or [...]

Once I identified the problem – that I have too many things rushing in clamoring to be written about, thus causing the dreaded “writer’s block” – the solution seemed simple enough. Create a thought pot to just dump stray thoughts and ideas in, and free my mind for greater things.  Adam & Eve / The [...]

You know those people – they say they get up before dawn, grab their coffee and then sit down and clatter out thousands of words before the morning paper even hits the door?   Yeah, that’s not me. I so want it to be but I am not, I have discovered, an early morning writer. [...]

I completely missed Black History Month. Missed writing about it, anyway. I’m not terribly surprised, though – it seems the last thing I want to do during Black History Month is write about Black history. General contrariness, I think. Instead, I read a lot. Or downloaded at lot to read, even if not quite yet. [...]

You know how you learn something, and you know it intellectually, you can recite the why’s and the wherefore’s of it, and can explain it to someone else – but you know, and you know you know, that you just don’t get it? Well, that was me – with any number of things (like long, [...]

The newspapers spread wide against the wall are so bright it is only a moment later that I notice the small woman framed by them and the old quilts covering the beds, they’d probably bring a fortune today but then they were just old quilts. Who was she? The credits say “Mulatto ex-slave in her [...]