Novels

What Comes Next?

Alrighty, my lovely reader. I’ve written about moving home, minimalism, mothering, kids, creating stuff, writing a novel. Each month I feel like I have a brand new idea. Actually, I have lots of ideas, but many of them fit into my Won’t Write About That Publicly File.

Such non-starters include:

*Explicit stories about my kids’ private thoughts and lives (too many future therapy bills)

*Dragging strangers over the coals to be funny (trying to spread kindness here, even though I feel like there could be a bitingly wonderful blog post about that one woman who moans throughout an entire yoga class…)

*The Basic Mommy Blog that goes “I hate my life and my choices and my children with a burning passion for 8 paragraphs except for the last paragraph where everything is sunshine and rainbows because I now I feel guilty let’s publish this yeah!” (Those are inauthentic, disturbing, and sappy all congealed together in a burning crockpot of slop. Not to mention the fact that I like my life and my choices and my children and I would like them all to like me back…)

*My teaching job (dancing on the edge of ethics and also against the actual law in many instances)

I’ll tell you a secret. Something that has interested me for awhile would be an online book, published chapter by chapter in monthly increments. You can read for free, get a taste of my storytelling abilities, and then, Godwilling, when I finishing Draft 2 of The Ripple of Stones, find an editor, the editor finds a publisher, and the thing actually comes into being, you may want to actually spend a small bit of $ to buy the thing! After all, you’ve already read one! Why not another? Really, it’d be a twofer.

But still. You’ve stuck with me this long. I would like to know what interests you. What is valuable to your time and attention when you receive these tomes in your inbox each month?

So for this month’s installment, we’re going to turn this blog into a Goosebumps-themed Choose Your Own Adventure! My darling reader, would you please take this lovely poll?

Subscribers, you may have to click over to the website to take the poll. Thanks for the extra click!!

As always, thank you for reading. See you in June!

IMDb For Books

Volume 1

The good husband had a brilliant thought this week: what if there was an IMDb for books?

You know when you finish a movie or – le gasp – a TV series and you’re in denial that it’s actually over, so you hop onto IMDb to read all the trivia?

Would this not be so much fun???

Wouldn’t it be cool to know if Harry Potter’s name was originally Steve? Or if J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous ring was based on toe-ring his wife bought on their honeymoon? Or, what if the publisher of “Little Women” had really pressured Ms. Alcott to change her title to “Dutiful Girls” but she was a pioneering feminist who said “No, these characters are strong, independent women, even if they are young?”

I visited the Gone With the Wind Museum with one of my best friends and found out that Margaret Mitchell broke her leg, got bored sitting around and was like, “Eh, maybe I’ll write a book.”

Are you kidding me????

Read On

I Just Decided To

The worst last words are, ” I wish I would’ve…”

These things we plan for When: when we have time, when we have money, when we retire… what are they?

During the minimalist ritual of Throwing Out The Stuff, I discovered an old notebook, buried deep in a box. It is truly a beautiful object. My dad brought it back from a business trip to India years ago. The textured sepia cover features an inset picture painted on hand-crafted paper. A lady dances by a stream, her crimson sari waving in the breeze. You have to look closely to see all the little details; the cover almost begging to be opened.

Inside, I found my younger self, scrawled in purple ink. I had even given my little book a title: “Random Words.”

I was so deep at fifteen.

Settling myself on the cold cement floor of the basement storage room, I leafed through more pages. Pencil sketches of wide-brimmed trees, lakes with rivers leading into the horizon, a portrait of a friend. Each drawing accompanied a poem I had written. The purple scrawl told of maiden heartbreak, the tribulations of adolescence. Death, who came for a friend much too soon.

The illustrations I had drawn were rough, but the words… my words, even teeming as they were with teenage angst… They held truth.

“It was gnawing at me from Someday, aching to be created.”

Read On

Creative Spaces

Virginia Woolf said “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” J.K. Rowling recently got trolled on Twitter as an elitist for mentioning her writing room in her little Scottish castle. Let me tell you, if “The Ripple of Stones”

A. gets published,

B. I turn it into a series,

C. Hollywood options it for a blockbuster franchise and

D. It become a cultural phenomenon with its very own theme park,

I too will have myself a writing room in a castle in Scotland. Y’all can come visit.

Read On

Novels

Volume 1

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