In all my years of living in the country, driving skinny back roads through the woods and past expansive cornfields, dodging deer and the occasional ground hog, I’d never actually hit an animal.
Until this past Wednesday.
In fact, miraculously (and not to jinx them) no one in my family had ever hit a deer. So maybe we were due.
Continue reading “In An Instant”I’m jumping off this crazy merry-go-round of publishing and promoting. Enough is never enough, but, you know, I am enough. #amwriting but #amdonepromoting
I’m losing my gumption for writing.
Or at least for publishing.
I can’t imagine myself ever not writing. The publishing part, though, it drains my soul.
As much as I want my stories to land on the hearts that need them, I am tired of how ‘less than’ publishing makes me feel.
It’s an incredibly competitive industry and one that is skewed towards the people who
Continue reading “I’m Enough”This past year has felt a bit surreal. As if the world was unplugged and we are collectively holding our breath, waiting for it to be plugged back in and spring to life like my laptop after a hard shut down.
Some writers I know have been absolutely unable to write. Their worlds disrupted understandably.
I was not one of those writers.
Continue reading “What Happened When I Stopped Running”Hey, it’s been a minute since I last wrote, hasn’t it?
Lately I’ve been distracted by a HUGE project that is exciting and scary and so, so important to me. It’s a dream I’ve had ever since the first time I stepped into a southern animal shelter and saw what was happening, and thought, “How the heck can this be going on in this country?”
This country is big-hearted, generous, and completely obsessed with dogs. How do I know this?
Continue reading “How Can You Raise 20K Really Quick When It Really Matters?”Okay, okay, so I kind of fell off the SHOW YOUR WORK daily bandwagon, but I have great excuses.
Excuse #1: I was getting tired of me, me, me.
When you have a new book coming out, you have to promote yourself. I always struggle with this, and that probably Continue reading “SHOW YOUR WORK A Week Later”
So much can change in a week, right? Our world turns upside down. Everything is different.
And yet it is still the same.
For me, there are still dogs to rescue, family to feed, books and blogs to write, and with spring, a garden to tend.
I am so hyper-aware (and incredibly grateful—to what? God? Fate? Timing?) that we are lucky. Continue reading “HELP WANTED: From a Distance”
Today is Remember Me Thursday. It’s a day to light a candle to remember the countless dogs who are waiting in shelters for a forever family or who have lost their lives while waiting.
Having just spent over a week visiting the shelters and seeing the faces of so many good dogs, it is especially poignant.
There were definitely moments when the situation overwhelmed, when it seemed like an impossibly tall mountain that we will never be able to climb. I hear again and again that the number of dogs losing their lives in shelters is shrinking, but as I walked along cement floors Continue reading “Remember Me Thursday”
In fiction, it’s the conflict that generally drives a plot. It’s what keeps us reading – wondering if a character will get what’s coming to them, survive the threat hanging over them, or have a fight with the crazy ex-girlfriend.
But in real life, it’s human instinct to avoid conflict. Sometimes, though, conflict finds you.
When I got up yesterday, I was in a good place. Continue reading “How One Small Terroristic Threat Can Really Ruin Your Day”
Every writer loves promoting their books.
Not.
I’m deep in the midst of promoting my latest book and, to tell you the truth, this time around is WAY fun. That’s because I’m sharing almost every event with a dog or two.
Dogs make everything better.
Truth.
My last three books were novels – stories I made up sitting at my laptop on long afternoons and pre-dawn writing jags. I crafted characters and lived their lives- but only in my head.
The main character in my latest book, Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs, is much more real…. Me.
So instead of dreaming up my drama, I lived it.
It’s easy to take risks when writing fiction, everyone knows you’re making it up, even if they suspect you’re actually writing about them (but changed the names and distinguishing features).
It’s another thing entirely to take risks while writing memoir. Memoir is nothing if not Continue reading “Lay Your Truth on the Page”
I have a speaking engagement coming up tomorrow in front of a tough audience.
Elementary school students.
It’s Career Day and I was invited to an Elementary School in Maryland, along with lots of people who likely have much more exciting careers than mine. I’ll have just 10 minutes per group to talk about what I do and answer questions.
I’m in a quandary about what I should tell them.
Writing is pretty boring. At least the act of it.
Unless you’re inside my brain, I appear awfully sedentary. Most days I bore my office mates to sleep.
So, what should I tell the kids?
Obviously, they’ll find my dog writing much more interesting than my women’s fiction writing or my occasional freelance pieces about parenting or organics or writing. They probably know more than me about marketing yourself via social media. And I’m pretty sure that talking about the largest part of my writing day – editing – would bore the life out of them, as it does me.
My tentative plan is to dazzle them with the dogs. I’ve even printed out a few 8x10s of some of my more exciting foster dogs to flash them.
My biggest dog- Whoopi. Continue reading “Changing the World”
My Life in Paragraphs 