After a long hiatus from blogging, two long years of social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic, sixteen months of hard work, draft six of my novel completed and in good shape, the next thing on my list, the thing I’d been avoiding for years, was to redesign my website and consider blogging again. So here I am, doing just that!

With more than one hundred posts behind me and a book pushing to be born, I’m going to take a break from posting. Please keep in touch!

You have lots of ideas about how to proceed, and by tapping your own wisdom, you can create your own plan for developing and completing your book.

“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle.”—Virginia Woolf

Paul Auster reflects on the writing of his latest novel. There’s lots of wisdom in this brief video.

Here’s what I learned from hearing Gail Tsukiyama, award-winning author of seven novels, in conversation with the legendary Dorothy Allison at an intimate Hedgebrook event in San Francisco last week.

“What you want to do is write the best book you can write. There is no timeline to that. Do the best you can do with what you have. Get rid of the timeline.”—Gail Tsukiyama

Artist Cesar Kuriyama spent a year videotaping one second every day. What if we started a One Second Every Day journal and filled it with sense impressions?

So it’s official. I’m going to spend a month—probably November—writing a scene or two a week, maybe every day. If you want to join me, here are some resources to help us get started.

“Find the entry point that will hold up … and the voice that will sustain the work.”—Dorothy Allison