Yesterday, someone kept telling me I was “superhuman” because I’ve dealt with challenges. I’m a mother who loves her daughter and made some sacrifices. That doesn’t make me superhuman. That make me a parent. In the past, I’ve been called “inhuman” because I had to make brutal, agonizing decisions about my daughter. That doesn’t make…

I’m spending the summer in Spain, which is the upside of being a freelancer, although I also have to work while I’m here, which is the downside of not being independently wealthy. I was on a bus to Seville when I had an idea for a new fantasy novel, which I probably didn’t need, given…

I originally conceived of Lucinda (from The Wanderer) as a younger character who has a kind of naïve faith that things will work out. Possibly this is because I started writing her years ago when I had a kind of naïve faith that things would work out. But as Lucinda’s story evolved from a simpler…

I started this morning trying to remember the phrase for “quotation marks.” I came up with “word hole.” Which, in fact, is a perfect description of how I feel about my current work-in-progress, an apparently neverending story that just isn’t quite there yet. All the words go in and nothing comes out. Well, not yet….

“Follow up with Miranda,” the note on my schedule says. Miranda is the main character in a novel I’m writing and I’m staring at this note, trying to figure out why I’m following up with her. Did I mean “Revise Chapter 9” or something? So I open the mansucript, and I start exploring what kind…