My first Muse and the Marketplace conference! I became a Grub Street member last year. Their annual 3-day writers’ conference is right here in downtown Boston. Here are my thoughts on the first day. Keynote: Luis Alberto Urrea gave an inspiring speech about how everyday moments and small details are sacred — especially ones that …
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How to Stop Time and the perils of not getting older
Matt Haig’s “How to Stop Time” has a premise I can’t stop thinking about, but is marred by a whiny, self-absorbed main character. Haig has a great idea: what if there were a condition that caused people to age so slowly that they live for hundreds of years? There is a real medical condition called …
NaNoWriMo and improving my prose
I did it! I won my first NaNoWriMo. (Which you win by writing 50,000 words between November 1st and 30th.) And I now have a first draft of my very first novel. It’s 105 single-spaced pages in Word, which is longer than anything I have ever written. It needs a LOT of work, but it …
Black-ish Season 5 Premiere Recap (Spoilers)
I just watched the season 5 premiere of Black-ish and I’m mad. First things first: I still love the show. It’s entertaining, sharp, and funny. But this episode was disappointing. Bow and Dre are a team like the old days, without a single callback to their marital troubles that dominated the second half of season …
Middle finger
On the platform at the Harvard T station, a man was singing and strumming a jaunty version of “Hotel California.” He had a harmonica strapped to his face, and was pumping his feet to beat a drum and make a small dog puppet move back and forth as he played. A woman with straggly gray …
Micellar water
Beauty enthusiasts love micellar water. It’s supposed to be good for cleansing and makeup removal. What is micellar water? Why is it any different than regular water? Is micellar even a word or did some cosmetics company make it up? Micelles and polymers Merriam-Webster defines “micelle” as “a unit of structure built up from polymeric …
Louis Sachar
Today I went down a little Internet rabbit hole and learned about Louis Sachar. It started when a friend said, which made sense in context, “Fine, then he can look at a monkey.” I said, “Wasn’t there somebody in the Wayside School books who yelled something like, ‘TOUCH A MONKEY’?” She didn’t know. A little …
Snow White
I tried to tell Young Kid the story of Snow White. But I was missing some key plot points: 1.Why does Snow White fall asleep instead of dying? 2. How long does she stay asleep? 3. Doesn’t a prince kiss her awake? But then where do the dwarves come in? 4. How does it end? …
Wanting to know
Today someone told me about a story in which the main character had a mind-reading superpower. I have always thought that reading other people’s minds is a bad idea. What you’re thinking at any given moment is not necessarily reflective of how you actually feel, or what you care about, or what you will end …
Evening pages
Julia Cameron says to write morning pages. I take morning walks. So I will write evening pages. I think she also says never to read your morning pages, and she definitely says not to type them, but I am publishing this, so there. I have no plan for what to write. I will just spend …