Great Tips for Your Blog

Morning Words and Magic

In the early morning, the summer air is magnanimously cool. I rise before anyone else is awake. I sit on my little cushion, close my...

Learning to Meditate, Learning to Write a Novel

When I first picked up Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I was in a pretty bad place. I’d been a mom for about three years, and...

For Emotion- and Character-Based Writers: How to Get to the Plot?

For a very long time, when someone asked me what my novel was about, I became really anxious. It didn’t matter if I had two-hundred or...

To a Writer, Whose Baby Will Not Sleep

Oh, mama. Things haven’t gone as you’ve planned, have they? It’s eleven o’clock at night, and your baby has been screaming for the last...

Using Fear as an Editing Tool

From an evolutionary standpoint, fear is very useful. It was fear—increased heart rate, tense muscles—that allowed our ancestors to...

On Presence & Writing

About a year ago, standing near the cold cut display, I met a woman who said she’d been to infinity and knew the meaning of life. She’d...