None of them involve a cape! I may not have the power to fly or read minds, but I’ve developed a few, strange, human superpowers over the years that can also be seen as oddly comforting when you reframe them as a positive. After I wrote Love and Other Incurable Ailments, I slowly realized I hadn't invented the quirks of the main character Serenity. I gave her a few of my own. Maybe being … [Read more...]
Flattened, Twisted, and Still Alive: The English Language
The Beauty of a Battered Language: Finley Peter Dunne (1867 – 1936) once quipped, “When we Americans are done with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Nearly a century later, we’re still joyriding over words, backing up, running them down, and taking them for new spins. That's the charm of language. It evolves, adapts, reinvents itself with … [Read more...]
To Name or Not to Name: Writing Fiction in a Real Place
When Fiction Meets a Real Place Anne Tyler amazes me with how she writes about real places, Baltimore, especially, and yet somehow makes them entirely her own. Her fictional neighborhoods feel familiar, but her corner stores and diners have names you’ve never heard before. You feel as if she’s built a parallel Baltimore just a few streets over from the real one. In my first novel, set near … [Read more...]
The Unexpected Comfort of a Spreadsheet: Trying New Things
What We Resist Until We Don’t For years my husband has been extolling the virtues of spreadsheets. Whenever I felt overwhelmed with tasks, he’d calmly say, “Why don’t you make a spreadsheet?” I’d groan. To me, that was just one more task, one I didn’t quite know how to do, as simple as it seemed to my logical-thinking spouse. To be sure, I can accomplish quite a bit on the computer. I design … [Read more...]
Five Months to Release Date: A Magical Week in Ocracoke
It’s five months before my novel’s release, and I’m freaking out a little bit. But visiting Ocracoke — the tiny Outer Banks village that became the setting for the story, and where my heart is— helped calm me. Between bookstore visits, literary connections, beach drives, breakfast at Pony Island, and the Firemen’s Ball, the week felt like a celebration not only of books, but of the island … [Read more...]
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