It was Julia Child who famously said, “Never apologize. Never explain.” She was talking about cooking and how to handle the inevitable situation of screwing up dinner, but the advice applies to almost anything. When I apologized for something ridiculous I did online a million years ago, a friend sent this quote to me and encouraged me to stand my ground, a lesson I needed to learn to navigate the internet and a writing life as much as anything else. A few months ago, I wrote that quote in my …
writing
February 5
The sun is shining today, dipping in and out of clouds. The world is still blanketed in snow from three days ago, but it’s slowly melting. Everything dripping. The driveway is clear, but the sidewalks are not, and I’d love to take a walk through town today. But the untouched snow would hit me mid-calf, so I can’t make the trek and I refuse to walk in the road. Adam took the car and Lily to the science museum today; the other car is getting an oil change. So, I am home alone and car-less, …
Writing Small: The Case for Ten Minutes a Day
Over the summer, I did a little experiment: I wrote for ten minutes a day for thirty days. It wasn’t a profound experiment, by any means—just something small to help grease the wheel. Most mornings, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went straight to the computer. I set the timer for ten minutes and wrote, mostly with no thinking. No rules except to write the entire time. I heard about this specific experiment from Devi Lasker’s interview on The Stories Between Us podcast. She recommends writing …
January 29
It’s Friday morning and my daughter has asked for a pajama day, which is fine with me because it’s been a long week and currently the temperature outside is 16 degrees. I have a prescription to pick up and a library book on hold, but I could easily stay home in my sweatpants all day. I make myself an extra cup of coffee and we make a plan to meet up at 10 o’clock to read side by side. Between now and then, I want to sit at the computer to write. I’m thinking about things like soul care and …
Some Thoughts on Rewriting Old Stories
Last year, I read Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance the week it came out. In it, Shapiro finds out through DNA testing that her father was not her biological father, and that she was conceived via artificial insemination using a sperm donor. The book deals with the fallout, as she grapples with issues of identity, truth, and the ethics and implications for donor-conceived children. Shapiro has been one of my favorite writers since I read Still Writing the previous year and loved her take on the …