I’m paying for a handful of groceries when the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?” I open my mouth to answer when it occurs to me that the answer isn’t “paper” or “plastic,” it’s “neither.” I can carry what I have in my hands. This gets me to thinking about how often we set up our…
Month: March 2009
Choosing the path
When I began training in martial arts, it meant a whole new life for me. It meant I gave up smoking and cut back on drinking and watched what I ate and worked out every night. All of these were good things and I felt positive about them. It was just that sometimes I missed…
On choosing
The other day, I was complaining to a friend of mine that the problem with being a neurotic writer is that neurotics hate uncertainty – we’d rather hear “no” than “I don’t know yet” – and writers live in a constant state of uncertainty. You send your book or your pitch or your proposal out…
Pick Happy
This is a reprint of an essay I wrote a few years ago. Next week I’ll be writing about the choices we make and I’d like to start by sharing this experience. We’re in a grocery store and my seven-year-old daughter Jessica wants some stickers. Since this is the reward I always give her for…
On doing the work
Occasionally aspiring writers ask me how I got my first romance published. I tell them that it began as a project — an assignment, really — that a colleague suggested I do when I told her that my agent liked the mystery I had submitted to her but thought the romance between the two main…
The story of your life
Many years ago, when my daughter was born with a rare genetic disorder, her neurologist learned that I was a writer and asked if I would keep a journal of my experiences, something he could share with other families on a like journey, making the hard decisions that parents of badly ill children sometimes have…