Career advice

When I moved to Los Angeles, I started writing the sequel to my earlier memoir (The Improbable Adventures of a Middle-Aged Woman). I kept written journals but something kept nagging at me to draw. I am not by any stretch of the imagination an artist. This did not stop me from trying. Not knowing how…

I was five years old when I decided I wanted to make my living writing novels. It’s the only thing that has never changed about me. As I grew older, friends and family let me know how difficult it was to make a living as a writer. Becoming a writer, it seemed, was not a…

The sound of rain woke me up this morning and for a moment I was about ten years old and I was exultant because rainy summer days were very rare where I lived. On a rainy summer day, I was not required to go outside and play. I could stay inside and read book and…

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….

1. Rental scooters. Hipsters, stop running down little old ladies on the sidewalk, FFS. 2. Dog poop. 3. No matter how hard I try, my hair always looks like Lori Loughlin’s, and god knows this is not what I want. 4. That dude in the Atlas Shrugged T-shirt. 5. No one wears jeans, not even…

To live your life in your own way is the ultimate success – and an ongoing struggle. I explore that struggle in my work and have tried to embody it in my life. The Wanderer, the first in a series of novels about a pagan medieval world, introduces Lucinda who must learn to embrace who…