Career advice

One of the things I like about traveling is that I always end up with a bunch of story ideas while I’m doing it. I need the butt-in-chair time of staying home to actually do anything with these story ideas but I almost never have them if all I do is stay at home. Which…

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…

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…

Let me tell you a story about good ideas. When I first started teaching developmental editing, I taught a beginning class for a year or two and it became very popular. The sponsoring organization asked me to teach an intermediate class. So I did that. Finally that asked if I could teach another class, again…

Once upon a time, the word gramarye (“grammar”) meant magical lore. Over time it took on the meaning of “the set of rules that govern how a language is written and spoken,” but I love that ancient link between language and magic. From the time I was old enough to read I’ve felt the deep…

One of the things I have missed in the pandemic is getting new inputs and having new experiences. These lead to serendipities in my writing (problems solved and new directions taken) and keep me engaged and energized. A few months ago, just emerging from our isolation, my daughter and I went to a harbor-side restaurant…