Linda K Sienkiewicz

Writing life, line by line

Jigsaw Puzzle Love

By

Passion for Puzzles in a Pandemic Last March, 2020, during the stay-at-home order, my husband Don and I put together a puzzle we'd saved for our next beach vacation, since we weren't sure if we'd be traveling anywhere that summer. After that, we finished another saved puzzle. Then we bought a few we saw in the window at Lytle's Pharmacy-- you could browse the tagged puzzles and games on … [Read more...]

Glow little glow worm: for Mom

By

Glimmer, glimmer: When cleaning out the basement, I found my son's Glo Friends collection from the 80s. They were so gosh darn cute. I'm glad I saved them. Best of all, those "crazy aeronautical boll weevils" still "illuminate yon woods primeval!" In other words, they still glow in the dark! Funny how some things stick with you, like songs, scents and old phone numbers. My late mother used … [Read more...]

Why We Write

By

“Fiction is supposed to be, forgive me, less shitty than life. Better than life. It is supposed to make more sense than life. That’s one of the reasons we read, one of the reasons we write. We want to feel we are forgiven and that there is hope…. Redemption is and always has been a staple of American fiction.” ~Author Molly Giles, in Odds on Ends, “The Writer’s Chronicle” Noble … [Read more...]

Why Great Stories Need Flaming Chainsaws

By

Ever wonder what elements in storytelling make a book catch fire? What makes a book impossible to put down? Flaming Chainsaws I found this gem of an essay on storytelling with an unlikely title,  The Dance of the Flaming Chainsaws, by Benjamin Percy and wanted to pass it along to my readers. Percy wanted to understand how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is 672 pages long, was … [Read more...]

The question I never answered: Babysitting at fourteen

By

The Mystery of the Babysitting Gig Like a good babysitter, I showed up on time, put the kids to bed when I was supposed to, and, as a bonus, washed the dishes before the parents got home. I liked kids. I didn't yell at them or slap them across the face, like one babysitter had done to me years earlier. She'd brought cookies, and I told her they were "crummy," meaning full of crumbs. I … [Read more...]