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Doggone It!
I’ve gone to the dogs. By which I mean, dogs keep wriggling their way into the my fiction. If you’ve read Accidental Child, you know that a beagle named Otis figures significantly in the opening scene when he lunges to chase ducks and pulls his owner off balance. She falls and wakes up in another…
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Read It Again
Read and reread, that’s what I did in school when I studied. My anatomy book was dog-eared by the end of the course. It felt like punishment, but rereading got me through all the sciences that I needed to learn as a nurse. Now I read mostly for pleasure, with a good dose of research mixed into…
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Writing Is a Business
You see that title? Do you believe it? I do, I do, but I have not always acted on that belief. Well, this week I got fed up with the helter-skelter nature of my work and decided to do something about the practical side of life. Not the writing side. I’m compulsive about that, as my regular…
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Map That Story
Bill Roorbach’s craft book Writing Life Stories recommends mapping a once-familiar neighborhood in order to spark memories. That works very well. On Friday, over breakfast, a writer friend and I talked about a memoir project she has going and thinking about the streets where she and her brother played cranked up her imagination and focused her point of view.…
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Frozen Stiff
She’s frozen by indecision and fear. Fear of boring people, fear of not writing a helpful piece that answers the so-what question, the why-should-anyone read what she has to say. She’s not famous, not a celebrity from the cover of a magazine. OMG! She makes more coffee, listens to more music, takes a shower–anything to…
Karen Douglass, Author 