This is a more poignant Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Memorial Day — than usual for me. It’s been a couple of years since my mother, an Auschwitz and death march survivor, passed away. Life for many years before her death…
Category: Essay
WIP
Back from hiatus, and starting, edits on my second Shmuley Myers book. It builds on an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Austin police homicide detective in a world (soon to be real, apparently) where every non-birth pregnancy becomes a murder investigation, contraception is illegal, church and state prance together in an evil waltz.
Shmuley needs to balance his roles as a pious Jew, a loving husband, his job as a civil servant, and…
Censoring Gutenberg
While I’m sure that WordPress’ new post editing mechanism is a cool, slick, thing, it’s enough of a jump from the old way that I’ve heard several authors complain. Which is stupid. And that one needs to download (yet another)…
Goals done, gone, ahead… and a musing
Goals people make are frequently not SMART. And that makes them all fuzzy, and frustrating, frankly, when trying to assess progress. 2018 has been, for me, surprisingly good, exciting, and charges me with hope and excitement for 2019. Creativity It’s…
Trunk Novels & Research
By my count I blew five weeks and generated ~100k words on a novel I’m regretfully consigning to the metaphorical trunk. And what’s funny is that I’m sure that if this novel was written forty years ago, it’d be on…
A Writer’s Primer on Computer Care and Feeding
We’re in the midst of National Novel Writing Month, and I’m reminded of several instances where the moan of “I just lost everything!” was heard over a coffee shop table. I’ve talked with writers who’ve lost entire manuscripts. Others that…
WWI: A Century’s Past / Veterans Day
World War I was hideously expensive and wasteful in terms of talent. A generation of young people, of talent, of possibility–gone. The hope and potential of growing their lives and cultures mowed down, gassed, and slaughtered. And that lost of…
Hopes, Dashed
I’m already several thousand words into my latest, but had to stop for some research. More research. Interviewing dancers research. (Okay, my daughter, but still…) And then I remembered Jeanne and Spider Robinson’s book “Stardance.” Well, I actually remember the…
Leonard Cohen: Yahrzeit
Leonard Cohen’s music and lyrics have been my life’s soundtrack. Not the theme, just as background, mind you. I sang it out loud in an empty room while waiting in hospital after one of my father’s aneurysms. It was playing…
Motivations
I’m juggling too many books that aren’t finished. “Last Run” needs a 40% diet, and I’ve been plowing away at edits. “Zepps” has a hit list of dozens of changes (see my previous post: Knotted!) I’m wandering around, like a…