It’s a marathon: 50,000 words of prose, the majority of words for an 80,000-word standard mainstream novel. I’m at a little over 24,000 words this morning. Why am I doing this? Because writing is bliss and marketing a book is hell. Undergoing the process of trying to get a literary agent, who then tries to get your book a publisher, who then takes more than a year to publish it — that’s anyone’s definition of…
As a woman in a time when the recently elected leader of our country has expressed such raw misogyny, I definitely feel as uncertain of my future as Matisse’s “Woman with Hat” looks. So I was honored to have my poem “Wings Clipped” featured by WordPress Discover in an article about poetry in uncertain times: Chaos, Control: Four Poems for Uncertain Times. Four good poems you will want to read. And speaking of the woman…
Update on my #NaNoWriMo2016 — today I wrote over 3,000 words. It helps to be doing a lot of scene-setting in an exotic location, which for my book is the picturesque Ligurian coast of Northern Italy. It also helps that I love writing descriptions of scenery and towns. I love researching places I’ve been or been near. I spent time in Santa Margherita and Portofino, and the little town where I’m setting my book is…
We’ve been doing it since before Jane Austen. Girls writing fiction. So in the 2016 National Novel Writing Month, I’m going to guess that a majority of the more than 400,000 participants this year are women. And many will go on to publish their books. Some NYT bestsellers by women that began as NaNoWriMo exercises: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill[32] The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, published…
I did it. I signed up to write 50,000 words in the month of November. Partly, I did it because I’m writing a new novel, The Romantics Club, about two half-sisters who inherit a cottage in Italy and along with it, the ghost of the poet Shelley. I wanted something to distract me from two inevitabilities: death, this one my beloved brother’s; and waiting to hear about my completed manuscript, in this case from agents…
I spent my morning reading and replying on the Women’s Fiction Writers Association website to a discussion about defining women’s fiction. One of the topics was trends in Women’s Fiction, and in that thread the topic of “girl” and “wife” books came up. Bestseller titles tell you much about the trend: Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Kitchen God’s Wife. Girls who are women…
The evanescence in British artist Andy Goldworthy‘s work is what first caught hold of me. (Click the link for Artsy’s wonderful Goldsworthy pages.) He works with nature to make sculptures of the moment, or perhaps the hour, using all natural elements. Ice, water, leaves, twigs, wind, rain are the easel, palette, paints, and media he sculpts with. It’s as if he’s having a conversation with nature and time, an intense wrestling almost. His work seems…
This week I lost my dearest brother, David Abramson, one of the kindest, gentlest people I will ever know. Sixty-four years was not nearly enough to be connected, so I’m sure we’ll meet again in the next rooms of existence. Among the several arts he pursued — visual and culinary as well — was the bliss of making music. He wrote songs, he led several bands, and he was always learning more about his craft.…
Every once in awhile, an author should Google herself. I did my routine check last night and was amazed to discover that Prairie Schooner, one of my longtime favorite literary journals, had reprinted one of my poems. “Listening to the Paint” appeared in their 2012 issue, at a time that coincided with the record-breaking sale of an abstract painting. So PS chose to include my poem in their series of reprints. The poem is about…
I’m really happy that one of my most recently published poems was “Wings Clipped” and appeared in Issue 4 of a journal called Panoply. Several reasons: 1) I’ve had a panoply of acceptances this season — far more than my usual batting average! 2) “Wings Clipped” is the lead poem in my new manuscript, Arabesque (available to an interested publisher) and 3) the poem brings together the two art forms I’ve devoted myself to: dance…