A lucky coin

I’ll share a little story I found unexpectedly in a book that Santa delivered to my daughter this year: Our story began over a century ago when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Peterson found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he […]

A full circle

I’ve been re-writing, re-plotting, and re-drafting, the majority of a novel I wrote eight years ago. Shocking when I think it was that long ago that this project came into my thoughts and I began to write it. It took me one year to write that first draft. It was the first idea that spurred […]

When the birds fly

Just outside our front door, in a pot with a dead plant in it, we found a bird’s nest. After seeing a few nests ravaged on our property I assumed this one was destined with the same fate. The children watched for the mother bird, she was a rare sight, always in her nest and […]

A memory

When I began writing I had no idea how to find other writers. None of my friends or family wrote, and I had studied science in school. I went on-line and I looked up writing groups in my area. I found one that met once a month in a library close to my home. I […]

Nail polish, yoga, and laundry.

I’ve been writing for more consecutive hours in the past few weeks than I think I ever have. I’ve been training myself to extend my concentration span and my productivity. But, I’ve noticed that I need breaks. If I start to fidget, I know it’s time to pause a few minutes. Sometimes I fight this […]

do you ever self-sabotage?

I do. Sometimes. There are days when I wonder why I struggle so much to gain writing time, when it’s so difficult? When I’m exhausted and nothing is going my way, I make excuses of why I should just give up. And some of these excuses are even valid, and need to be worked through, […]

ode to the voices in my head

We’re all writers here. I can say this without scaring anyone away. If you’re anything like me, you’ll begin hundreds of stories that never make it to paper, and very often not even past the first few sentences. This is not a conscious thing, it’s not something I decide to do. All day (and sometimes […]