Aunt Saffi is on a roadtrip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. What have I learned so far? 1. No sane person RVs through California’s Central Valley or the Mojave desert in July. 2. Dante’s Inferno is actually located in Lost Hills, CA. Sulfurous water. Blazing temps. But the KOA camp is fine and there are…
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Thanks, Kate!
How do you know you have a great editor? Easy. If within two books, you’ve learned to go back and lop off the first few chapters—you know, the ones you really love where you wallow around with characters who’ve become your “friends” in your favorite cozy coffee shops. Unless you can stick a critical mystery…
Why Sketching Matters
One of my wonderful writers shared with me something picture book author Candy Fleming told her: to keep in mind that most of what we write will be crap. Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron also remind us to feel free to write the worst garbage in the world, especially first thing every day. What I…
Hitting the Road
What’s so great about living, writing, and traveling in a Class A recreational vehicle? They’re large lumbering beasts, hard to control, impossible to maneuver in cities, and they guzzle gas. The answer has been many miles in the making. A decade ago, I fell in love with the idea of living simply, letting go of…
Smoke Gets in Your…Brain!
For more than a month, I’ve been sucking down smoke in Ashland, Oregon. The whole state seems to be on fire. Admittedly, I haven’t seen any actual flames, but the Rogue Valley, where I live, is surrounded by wildfires. No matter which way the wind blows, we get smoke. More than 200,000 acres are on…
Sketching for Writers
Fresh back from teaching Mastering Setting with Kelly Going (K.L. Going), I am excited about a concept that arose and wanted to share it with my writing peeps. On Friday evening, we were fortunate to have Melanie Hall as a a guest. Melanie is an illustrator whose work I would characterize as musical and flowing….
Chocolate Whipped Cream
Today I’m thinking about chocolate whipped cream and that, sometimes there really can be too much of a good thing. I asked the young barista at Bloomsbury Coffee House in Ashland for “just a little” whipped cream. She proceeded to pile a chocolate whipped-cream mountain atop my almond milk mocha. I’m not quite sure why…
Join the Wild Girls
I just finished reading The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy, a writer whose work I had never read. It’s a middle grade novel about a girl who moves across country—from Connecticut to California–the friend she makes, and the stories they begin to write. It’s a book about writers and it’s a book for writers. There…
Grounded (in a good way)
What is it about moving that sets one off track for months? I was thinking about that question this morning, and how since I moved to Ashland I have done almost no writing. I’ve been settling in, trying to master the new editing job, enjoying the new town, trying to get my (adult) kids on…
The Worst of Times? The Best of Times . . .
What happened this weekend in Arizona had me despairing about the state of my country. Will we never learn to swim above it all? The violent rhetoric, the us-vs.-them mentality that leads one human being to hate another because of the difference in political affiliation or church membership or income level or skin color? While…
Cozies & Kim Griswell 