This month, the Vatican reprimanded a group of U.S. nuns proclaiming after four years of investigation that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.” Anyone who has been watching politics in relationship to the Catholic Church might have seen this coming, even before the/… Read full post »

I work in tech for my day job, so I came across this sometime in the past year.  Some people use it to search for violations of image copyright.

Google has an image recognition search.  You can input an image link, or actually upload a URL, and it will display something it… Read full post »

I’m going to break my rule and write a post about my son.  I shy from this, because I want to protect his privacy, and because I don’t want to endanger his safety in any way.   Not that I have any reason to feel that any of us are endangered.… Read full post »

So, the good agent on 5th Ave sent a very nice short rejection notice for my "debut" novel.  

I cried for less than 5 minutes.

Now I'm moving on. To what next I am not sure.  There were a few more agents on my list.  Someone else in my life… Read full post »

So, I have to go to work in a few moments, where I can't really show how excited I am...I've literally jumped up and down like a toddler (my son thought it was funny and a bit scary) and my best friend couldn't understand what I was saying on the phone… Read full post »

_{(This was my favorite experimental project from last year:  a novel written entirely via Twitter.  Hope you enjoy it.)}

The ghost attached itself to the head of a woman weakened from holiday shopping, filling her thoughts with plans of an ultimate escape. 

The ghost whispered, &ldq… Read full post »

From Strange Days...

If you call something a fact when it's fiction, you're lying.  But what if you call something fiction when it's fact?

Our very generous host of the OS Weekend Fiction Club posted a restriction on participation that the work must be “fiction.”  Now, I understand the overall rea… Read full post »

In June, I graduated with my degree in Acting from a prestigious conservatory school in NYC.  I had auditioned for agents and got called back by ABC, NBC, and the Philadelp… Read full post »

I have been following the work of Professor Jamie Pennebaker for a few years now.  He’s a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies writing and healing.  One of his basic premises is that the act of writing about traumatic events helps to heal the writer.  Ano… Read full post »

What is a girl to do with a guy who loves her?

Who finds her cute and entertaining, but after she’s married another?

What if he lies to himself and says they should just be friends—

And then decides late on, he was mistaken, she was the one.… Read full post »

What is a girl to do with a guy who doesn’t love her?

With someone who finds her cute and entertaining, but not serious marriage material?

What if he lies to himself and lets her play the role of partner and wife—

And then decides… Read full post »

Many years ago, I went to see Kurt Vonnegut speak in a huge auditorium.  He was articulate but distant. Oh, how I loved those books as a teen, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five and the whole lot of ‘em. They were a secret kind of knowledge about the world, the way… Read full post »

A few weeks before my father passed away, only days after he had entered the best nursing home our limited budget could muster, I went to visit him, and something was wrong.  Very wrong.  He wasn’t there.  I mean, his body was there, but HE wasn’t.

He had been diagnosed with… Read full post »

We are in the middle of renovating our kitchen.  I should be in heaven.  I am in hell.  I should be grateful that we are able to take on such an endeavor in this economy.  Instead, I am questioning my marriage and the meaning of home and the symbolism of a… Read full post »

I want to be drunker than I am.

I went to an American national neighborhood night out tonight, and heard all the gossip about the people that live near me.  The people who have lived around me for 1 or 20 years.

I heard… Read full post »

I am troubled right now about the predominance in my life of smart, sensitive men whose company I otherwise enjoy, but who suddenly spurt out sexist remarks in the middle of pleasant and entertaining conversation.

This happens, for the most part, at social and informal moments in my… Read full post »

As an armchair cosmologist, I can’t help but meditate on the recent news that scientists for the first time have witnessed, via satellite, the radiation signature of a star being pulled apart and “swallowed” by a supermassive black hole.

Dear readers, many of whom are working away at novels or larger scale projects, in addition to the short sweet blogs and flash fictions and lovely poems we share here, allow me to provide a status update of my yet untitled novel.

I’ve actually got about 5 titles, and the most… Read full post »