Cooking the Hook - NEW

"In reality, the woman belonged to sometime else as she was just here at this time by accident. A slip of the cosmic order had caused her to be born out of sequence, under the wrong stars. She had been overlooked by the universe. In the book of all names and beings, she was unlisted, with no past nor future written down for her. She was invisible to the gods, the passage of time and the protection of the stars."

In the late 50's I spent most after school hours in the public library waiting for my father to pick me up on his way home from work. I wore out the children's library in short order and haunted the upstairs, adult stacks where there many places to hide with whatever books I could reach. I was in third grade when I read John Hershey's “Hiroshima”. I remember taking it to the desk and asking the librarian if it was a true story. Alarmed, she asked, “Have you read it yet?” I knew I was probably in trouble, but I had to answer true. She looked at me sadly and said, “Yes, I'm sorry to say it really happened.” Not long after,  I was sent home from school for refusing to participate in the duck and cover exercises that were supposed to save us in the event of an atomic bomb attack. I told anyone who would listen that the wall of windows and bricks in our classroom would bury and burn us alive and we'd all be dead of radioactive rain and we'd never see our fam...

For those of you who don't know, this is WUUCON . It was grand, but now we are back and the task it to apply all that we learned to whatever we are working on. Picture trying to swallow a Whopper whole, no chewing permitted. I feel for the people who came to the conference with what they thought were completed manuscripts. There  were more than a few people with that pie-eyed, deer- in-the-headlights look on their faces as Lisa Cron crossed her forearms to make one of her many points or Donald Maass' eerie silences hovered over us as he studied the distance and waited for you to really absorb what he just said. All I have is a raggedy first draft. I don't think you call it an autopsy when the patient is still alive, but that's my task at hand. There will be screaming. Tears. To that end, I made a fresh start yesterday by relocating my workspace. The studio is still all about the textiles, stitching and visual art in a big way and mess. In one corner is the sma...

I posted the following to the group FB page. I'm late to this dance too. My first two hours off the plane were spent explaining my absence to a two-year-old who acquired language while I was gone and he wasn't buying my story. His watchword, the one all writers should quiver in front of, was “Why?” quickly followed by, “Hello, Nana.” simultaneously comforting himself with my return and scolding me for going in the first place. Maybe it's because I'm reaching old. Maybe my heart is just too scarred over, but I felt mysel f unwilling or unable to lean into to the sweet gravity of camaraderie that flashed all around me like groundling firecrackers. It was all wonderful to behold, felt like backing your butt up to a bonfire, not too close, thanks. I knew I wasn't alone in my reticence. The ghosts were not on the sixth floor at all. None of this to say I'm sad or sorry. On the contrary, I feel like I've been on a successful raiding party and have come h...

The trouble with bad guys is, there's no trouble. You just don't get their perspective on the situation.

It's not my blue heaven, but it will surely do. A good friend lives a short drive away and the complex is keeping the pool opened and maintained as long as the warm weather holds. We seem to be the only ones who know about it! For a while now I've been struggling with Scrivener, trying to make it print out only the synopsis. Even in the windows version, I can see the MAC mind of the designer everywhere. This PC brain finally solved the problem and I was able to bring a list of scenes with me, poolside. Reading and thinking my way through them and it dawned on me. You really can't kill the main protag three-fourths of the way through the book. Nope. Other less significant things were revealed, but this one's a biggie.

    Annabea and Tam had been secretly teaching each other to read and write since the little girl could sit up and hold a crayon. Tam had never learned and was reluctant to subject herself to scorn so she made do as many unlettered adults did. Each morning when chores were done, Tam would take off her apron, smack her broad palms together and say to Bea, “Time for school,” something she had no firsthand experience with.     The two-year-old laboriously stacked three county phone books on the kitchen chair, climbed to her perch and waited with her grubby little fists clutching air while Tam got out the pad of lined newsprint and the cigar box full of pencils and crayons. Tam warned her, “Now don’t be letting other people know about our business here,” as the two of them drew copies of the bold letters from the front page of yesterday's newspaper.     The truth was that Bea had figured out reading and writing on her own while she sat on an apple b...