People who know me well know that writing is my port in the storm, my beloved shelter amid the raging sea of everyday life. I write almost every day and I write a lot and when I don’t write, such as when I’ve traveling or I’m teaching at a conference, I need to be planning my next project in a notebook or at the very least, be talking to writers about, you guessed it, writing. So this past weekend I invited 12 people over for a lobster dinner and I didn’t get much writing done and I'm back at my desk with relief and gratitude. Because I write on weekends, I often write on holidays before I head off to the celebration or the guests arrive at my place, I write on my birthday, I write when I cannot sleep and when I really need sleep. But this weekend I was too busy cleaning, cooking, arranging flowers and worrying about what to do with the wriggling beasts….I’ve never cooked lobsters before and it seemed the perfect reason to stage an end-of-the-summer gathering.

But as the countdown to the party approached and I visited the farmer’s market for vegetables and cleaned the bathrooms and scrubbed the spots from the living room carpet, I wondered what I was getting into. The more I thought about the liveness of our entrée, the more squeamish I became. Which is why I’m forever grateful to my dearest friend who actually dropped the critters into the pot (we cooked outdoors) and watched over them as they turned bright red. I cooked the corn on the cob, sliced pumpkin-ginger bread and arranged nasturtiums on the plate, plattered the grilled chicken and green onions, set out salads and plates and popped more champagne and tried to figure out where people were going to sit since the table was filled with food and accoutrements. And once they were cooked I chopped them in half for some guests and poured them all ramekins of melted butter flavored with lemon, basil, chives and Italian parsley. It really pays to grow fresh herbs. And then I ate half a lobster and started clearing up the mess, and when the last guest wobbled out the door, I cleaned more and woke the next day my place smelling like a wharf and I kept cleaning. And when I discovered that some of the borrowed seafood forks were missing, dug into the garbage bag of lobster husks and greasy corn and trash and practically threw up for the first time since I was pregnant, which was when throwing up was my hobby. And then went to the farmer’s market because I’m going to whip up a huge pot of vegetable soup later today to settle my stomach and then I joined about twenty women for a brunch at a friend’s house, where, you guessed it, I talked about writing.

So the past few days were just plain busy and I’m glad the party is over and I’m back into my routine. And I need to remind people that NaNoWriMo is coming up in November and they should bite the bullet and settle in and crank out 50,000 words. And yes, you can crank out 50,000 words in 30 days because thousands of writers and would-be writers have been doing just that since 1999. It’s lots of fun, like a toboggan ride down a good steep hill is a lot of fun, and all the support you need is available at NaNoWriMo.org and if you live in a decent-size city there is a likely a group of writers meeting throughout November cheering each other on.

I talked with Chris Baty who is the founder of the whole shebang on Thursday. Talking to Chris is like a shot of adrenaline—he’s funny and bright and creative and kind and I can see how he first coerced 20 friends to join him in this crazy but then not-so-crazy venture back in 1999. I was reminded of Winston Churchill's quote that meeting Roosevelt was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne. Baty wrote about it all in No Plot? No Problem! (A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days). If you’re read the book, Chris sounds exactly like that.

The reason that I was talking to Chris is that NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit organization and some of the money and donations that they collect at the web site is spent building children’s libraries in Vietnam. Libraries have already been built and stocked with books and the stories between the covers of the books are changing young lives. I don’t know about you, but the city library in my hometown and reading in general, was the port in the storm of my childhood. In order to increase the donations to $5000, NaNoWriMo is going to offer donors my editing services along with mentoring from an agent and Chris Baty. I believe in libraries for children and people sitting down and writing as if their pants are on fire, no matter if the draft isn’t fabulous. There is always time to fix it once it’s written. Just sit there and start typing. And if you’ve got money to donate, help us bring books to these children.

“How can you . . . write well about a place? My advice can be reduced to two principles—one of style, the other of substance. First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; . . . As for substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don’t write that ‘the shore was scattered with rocks’ or that ‘occasionally a seagull flew over.’ Shores have a tendency to be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be unusual, or colorful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they do useful work.” William Zinsser

Summer weather has returned to our region and the morning has dawned blue and soft and clear. But still the signs of autumn are everywhere—in my fading garden, in the trees shifting to yellows and scarlets, in the pumpkins and peppers and gourds piled high at the farmer’s market.

I’ve been working on a bunch of editing projects this week and I want to suggest a few things about language. Something I mention often when I speak at writer’s conferences is that a writer needs to put himself or herself into the mindset of an editor. And the first thing you need to know about editors is that they’re word people. Most are English majors, most are also accomplished writers. At the very least they can spot whether you’re an accomplished writer or a hack and they will judge your level of skill after reading only a few sentences or your manuscript or query letter. They will base this judgment, not so much on your ideas—because there are lots of so-so ideas or story concepts that sell, and lots of terrific concepts and plots that fail—but rather on which words you use in your sentences to bring the reader into a fictional world, or to introduce an idea.

Editors notice is there is a bevy of modifiers clogging up sentences and if there is simply too many words used to get the job done in a sentence. Remember that every word in every sentence needs a job to accomplish. If it has no job, get rid of it. They will also notice if you use wimpy verbs, passive verbs, or passive linking verbs when vibrant and muscular verbs are called for to push the sentences along.

And because editors love language, they also notice if you’ve imbued your prose with a bit of fairy dust or figurative language. We use figurative language because it creates excitement, surprise, and layers of meaning and associations in the reader’s imagination. If your writing never makes these leaps, never makes comparisons, never dares to riff on a subject, the writing will be pallid.

So yes, yes, yes, learn all about plot and character development and subtext and structure. But start with your most basic tools and create magic, no matter the subject, word by word.

I write for the same reason I breathe-- because if I didn't, I would die. ~ Isaac Asimov

The sky has been confused lately with rain coming and going, the sun playing peek-a-boo, and sunsets that are part rosy glow, part gloom. I know I’ve been complaining about global warming and excess heat, but this much rain, so early in the season is odd. I was out running errands yesterday before my mahjongg game and the traffic was crazy, sort of a giant bumper car game with cars skidding around and tailgating and drivers seeming to have forgotten how to navigate slick pavement. For those who live in a desert I wish you could smell this place after the first rains of the season—it smells like sweet ferns and earth and there is a dampness that infiltrates your lungs and permeates your bones. Although the sun is returning later today, at least the forest fires in the region are sputtering out and our parched lawns and gardens are revived.

I woke up too early this morning so have been sitting here bleary-eyed working on my bad guys book. I’m writing the chapter on villains and evil and keep tossing around ideas about both. Sometimes the line between good and evil is fragile, sometimes it’s finite because people agree that rape, murder, and pedophilia are evil. So I keep wracking my memory for the best known villains in literature (I’m trying to avoid film references in this book, although I’m not sure that strategy will work) and then thinking back to the villains I’ve read about recently. George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series has terrific villains and lots of characters who shift alliances and morality as the need arises. He’s one of the few authors who allows his characters a real range to change over time.

But I wanted to mention that I’ve edited more short stories for a client this week and want to bring up a few points. If you’re writing short stories I believe that first you should be striving for is a single effect in the way that a song or poem strives for a single effect. Short stories are traditionally written to be read in a single sitting which makes the impact of the story more profound. There must be something important at stake for your main character and because you’re transporting a reader to another time and place, the short story must also contain a bit of magic.

Because of their length, short stories are fiction on a budget. You’ll also have fewer scenes (typically 3-7), fewer settings and characters and less dialogue. Dialogue needs to be crisp and strictly related to the story events. But then, despite your tight budget, a short story must portray significant events and the action must arc to some kind of peak. Now this doesn’t mean you need a shoot-out or divorce to end the story, but something important must happen to an interesting person at a crucial time in his or her life. One of the problems I see as an editor is that writers often create anecdotes, or a series of anecdotes instead of a situation that demands a resolution.

While there is no template for short stories, generally they are about conflict, a decision, or a discovery. The conflict plot should be staged so that an antagonist is the obstacle and the climax is a confrontation. If the short story climax has the protagonist making a decision, this decision should have far-reaching consequences. If the story ends with the character making a discovery through some kind of realization, this realization should have potential to be life changing

Finally, while short stories generally don’t have subplots, they need some kind of back story or influences from a time before the story began. This might be a recollection, a flashback or summary. If the reader is shown only the present moment with no knowledge of a character’s past or previous influences, the story can be thin and unconvincing.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. Rainer Marie Rilke

I woke to sullen skies and rain this morning. Standing at the open patio door I breathed in the wet air while my tea steeped. It was a busy weekend, hanging out with friends and writers. I bought an armchair and a friend and her husband delivered it Saturday morning and I spent a lot of time over the weekend cleaning and rearranging furniture in my living room, office and bedroom. As I was doing so I was thinking back to how I used to play house as a girl. I wonder if children still do this as much as our generation and those before us did. Perhaps not, since children, especially girls have more options before them.

All those years of playing house, making beds, dressing dolls, sweeping, whipping together meals of acorns and creek water and flowers were a wonderful way to spend time. It seems to me that it’s how children build their imaginations and learn to live within a story. I started going to the library when I was about four and one of the first books I read was The Box Children. It’s the story of four siblings who run away and for a while live in an abandoned box car in a woods. Just like me, the second oldest sibling was a girl named Jessie and also like me, she was charged with domestic chores and caring for her younger brother and sister. I cannot tell you how charmed I was by this story and how we played endless variations of it. When my youngest brother Colin was born we moved into a larger house amid a huge yard wreathed in evergreens and cedars. In some places the trees formed tunnels and in these spaces, we pretended to be brave orphans, fending for ourselves.

But as I mentioned, I also spent time with writers over the weekend. One woman who is retired has mostly stopped writing at this point. She seems disillusioned by the publishing world, and wonders why she should work on stories and poems when the publishing world is so difficult to break into. It’s hard to refute this logic, but I suggested that once you break in, that it’s always easier thereafter. Another writer who I had dinner with on Friday night is father to a toddler and stepfather to two older boys. He works full time and writes mostly in the evenings. His wife who stays home with the children has written five manuscripts and is reworking one of them. After we talked I imagined the clamor of their household and how hard it was for them to claim the time for their writing.

On Sunday I met another woman for tea. She wrote a novel ten years ago and at one time she had an agent and publishers interested in it, but the deal fell through. Since then she has relocated to Portland, gotten married, and went through a year and a half of health problems. She has started a new novel and was talking about the practical steps in staking out the time and space to write. She’s now a stepmother to two teenage girls and is going to buy a laptop. They’re also going to remodel their attic to create a master suite where she’ll have more privacy.

Over the years I’ve always mentioned to students that every writer needs a time and place that is all theirs for writing. Even if the place is a corner of a bedroom or a reconfigured closet. But of course, like all advice, this isn’t always possible. If before you can write, you’re forced to wrest the family computer from a teenager, or clear off the breakfast dishes from the kitchen table so you can sit there, it’s just one more barrier that stops the writing.

In college I minored in Women’s Studies and we talked about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It is a series of essays, based on Woolf's lectures addressing "the question of women and fiction." She ponders the question of a woman producing art such as Shakespeare’s plays. Woolf examines women's historical experiences and the unique struggles of the woman artist. She invented a sister for Shakespeare, Judith, and explains that she would have been denied her brother’s opportunities. Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write." I can remember our earnest, angry discussions in these classes, professors breaking new ground, introducing little known authors like Tillie Olson. We were killing off the vestiges of the Victorian era, but it seems to me that the struggle for space and time to write for both men and women, continues.

Last night a weather system from Canada bustled in here, completely changing the way the world feels. I was out walking at dusk and the wind was whisking the trees into an overhead rumba and the sun was setting in pales shades of pink, overshadowed by clouds roiling and gray. The clouds have remained this morning and rain is forecast although it’s early for us. With global warming it’s difficult to know what our weather is supposed to be like any more, but generally we have a bit of rain in September and summer lasts until about the end of October. In fact, often Halloween trick-or-treating happens in the midst of a downpour.

In Portland we still trick-or-treat at night, as seems right for the proper ambience and spookiness. I used to live in neighborhood of old houses and mansions and almost everyone decorated for Halloween turning front lawns into graveyards, porches and front hallways into haunted houses, and adding sound effects of shrieks and ghostly moans. Often grown-ups answered the door in costume, decked out for fright. Last night as I was hustling through my neighborhood it felt like Halloween and one neighbor had lit a fire in his fireplace scenting the air with woodsmoke.

This week for the first time in months I didn’t have an editing project on hand and so had more time for reading. I finished reading Kafka on the Shore, reread Say When by Elizabeth Berg because I’m using it for my antagonist chapter and am now reading Anna Quindlen’s new book, Rise and Shine.

I’m writing like a madwoman every morning and am currently working on three separate chapters on the book about bad guys in fiction. Using The Old Man and the Sea for reference, I’ve just concocted a list of elements that happen between an antagonist and protagonist in a story. Here are a few: The antagonist must be worthy and well-matched to the protagonist; he must reveal the protagonist’s Achilles’ heel; there must be some proximity and intimacy involved—a rivalry between classmates is interesting, a rivalry between sisters is riveting. The antagonist is always a threat, and always pushes the protagonist off-balance. In fact, you don’t want your protagonist balanced, chipper and mighty. You want to create him or her struggling throughout the story and the outcome must appear in doubt and cause apprehension in the reader.

My list of qualities goes on and on and I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to delineate the different qualities of bad guys in fiction. I keep asking myself what exactly is a villain, and I’ve come to realize that they fall broadly into two types, sympathetic and unsympathetic. It’s easy to delineate between an anti-hero and a villain, but now I’m starting to worry how I’m going to stake out the territory for dark heroes. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t included that chapter and am realizing that I’m going to need to read romances, gothic stories and fantasies in order to find examples. Often answers come to me when I’m out walking or driving, so the trick is to capture these thoughts as soon as I can grab a pen or hurry to my computer. But the writing is going well and the season is changing and so am I.

This morning there are jet trailings in a pale blue sky and it’s clear that autumn is on the way with cooler days and a changing landscape. Last Saturday the heat was almost unbearable, yesterday, the day was perfect after a nighttime rainfall that scrubbed the city. In the afternoon I met with a client who has written a short story collection. It was great to work on her stories because the writing was crisp, powerful, and insightful. She’s a medical doctor who has worked for 17 years in a clinic that serves homeless people. And I wish all my clients spent as much time working on and rethinking their stories.

She wants to finish the final rewrite by December and explained that she’s sick of working on the stories. I told her my theory of how often when a writer has been working on a manuscript for a long time that you often come to loathe it. I call it giving birth to ugly babies. When I was working on Between the Lines, I mentioned this to my editor who was a bit shocked, and wrote me an e-mail about how ugly ducklings turn into swans. No matter, I rewrite everything except this blog at least five times and advise everyone else to push their work through a series of drafts.

After I met with the doctor I joined friends to see the film Quinceanera. What a delight! Afterwards, we went out for dinner and talked about it, worrying over the characters as if they were still living in the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. where it was filmed. It’s about a girl named Magdalena who is approaching her 15th birthday and the important Latino custom of Quinceanera which celebrates the passage from girlhood to womanhood with an elaborate and expensive ritual and ceremony. But then Magdalena has a falling out with her family and goes to live with her great-uncle and gay cousin. It’s about acceptance and forgiveness and family and a Latino neighborhood in transition. It’s written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmorland, and it understandably won awards at Sundance. If want to see a fresh view of life and unaffected performances, especially by the leads Emily Rios and Jesse Garcia, this film will knock you on your butt.

If you’re looking for a fresh voice and approach to novel writing, you might want to pick up the novel Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I’ve only read the first 100 pages but am already understanding why he’s read by people far beyond Japan and why magical realism has so many devoted fans. It’s the story of a 15- year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to avoid a prophesy. He’s destined to meet another character, Tamura, a man who was forever changed when he became unconscious during a classroom outing during World War II. Tamura can talk to cats and one such exchange with an erudite Siamese is some of the wittiest dialogue I’ve read in years.

You might also want to listen to the Ann Garrels report on Guffran, a 9-year-old girl living in Baghdad that aired on NPR Saturday morning, September 9th. Her father was killed five months ago in a carjacking. When he was alive, she enjoyed writing letters to him and leaving them around their house for him to find. When he died, her letters were with him and she’s afraid the people who killed her father might come for her. But although she lives in terror, she's still writing him letters and always goes with her mother when she leaves home in case something happens to her mother, she can at least scream for help. The story is at www.npr.org where you can listen to Garrel’s broadcast.

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I’ll never forget the perfection of that sky, the promise of autumn, a morning and week so filled with beauty and so marred with tragedy. The dread about a world forever changed that clutched my heart. Please do not forget that this administration had been repeatedly warned about these attacks and chose to ignore the warnings; that these attacks and all their terrible losses and all the justifications for the acts that followed, including the invasion of Iraq, were likely preventable.

A book if necessary should be a hammer [or] a hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world. Wole Soyinka

Well yesterday at the same moment the Senate was about to bring a ‘no confidence’ vote against Donald Rumsfeld to the floor, Bush gave a weird speech where he admitted to that he’s been lying to us all along and secret prisons around the world do exist and that 14 of these prisoners will be transferred to Guantonamo. And of course mainstream media is not commenting on the fact that he’s been lying all these years. We operate secret prisons in other countries so there is no oversight on our interrogation methods and these people don’t have access to lawyers. Then, after letting the prisoners languish in Cuba for five years with some of them committing suicide in their despair, he wants Congress to ram through his legislation that refutes the latest Supreme Court ruling on how there prisoners are being held without trials and the Geneva Convention. The bill gives permission to torture and won’t allow him or the military to be tried for torturing. Of course, if members don’t vote for it, they will be accused of being soft on terrorism, similar to the high jinks of the Patriot Act. So the Bush crime family is busy with their usual bait and switch /smokescreen and trying to downplay the facts of how after 5 years Ben Laden is still on the loose and the occupation of Iraq is an expensive and deadly fiasco. Meanwhile the campaign to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11 is in full swing with the upcoming ABC docu-drama. Stay tuned for a massive smear campaign. Perhaps we should all boycott Disney, owners of ABC.

But enough about politics—there are many people who write more eloquently about this state of affairs. If I allow the Bush crime family to occupy too much of my mental energy, I tend to feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone or some unending nightmare.

Actually I was thinking about this past weekend. It began with my seeing Little Miss Sunshine, a movie I highly recommend. I don’t often go to see comedies because I just find so few of them funny with a few exceptions such as A Fish Called Wanda and Sideways. Little Miss Sunshine is hilarious and provides quite a role for Allen Arkin. I don’t want to give it away except that it’s a road trip movie with dysfunctional family in a VW bus with a broken clutch on their way to a kiddie beauty pageant. On Saturday I attended two concerts. One of them was at Sake One out in Forest Grove. It was blazing hot, the music was good and we toured the sake making facility. With its massive vats and presses, I would have never guessed it was so involved.

Second concert was at the Mississippi Studios—a fun place that I recommend for intimate venues. Then Sunday night I watched the first two segments of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO. He’s captured a lot of voices not normally heard about this tragedy (surely I don’t need to mention that this is another Bush fiasco?) along with amazing footage and controversial theories. In the final clip of part two, the camera spans a neighborhood which the winds and rain have lashed into shreds. Houses are reduced to splinters, cars are overturned, destruction is total. And I was reminded of the ending of the movie The Pianist when Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman emerges from hiding into the nightmare landscape of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. I believe that Roman Polanski created this backdrop on a computer, but the similarities between the two scenes is eerie.

I was listening to NPR on Saturday morning with Scott Simon interviewing Edward Medelshon, a professor at Columbia about his book The Things That Matter that explores how seven novels by women writers tell us about the stages of life. The novels include three by Virginia Woolf, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. The conversation talked about if meaning can be found in reading novels. Then Mendelshon made some interesting comments about the separation between the novelist and the novel. He said that Virginia Woolf the novelist was fearless and then they went on to discuss how she weighted her pockets with rocks and drowned herself.

But his comment that most intrigued me because it jives with how I think, was this one: “The author of a novel is different than the person who sat down to write the book…..The way in which a writer, when you sit down to make a work of art seems to be cooperating with hundreds, thousands of other writers to have the support of the shape of the novel, the have the help of the English language itself …with its rhymes and its puns and its echoes and allusions. And when you sit down to write this book you’re not alone. You have all of your reading, all of the language, all you have forgotten but that got into your head working with you, helping shape the way you think about the world. And that’s going to be something more profound I suspect, much of the time, but not always, than the way you sit down to breakfast.”
Isn’t that a marvelous statement—that we have all this help and embedded memory and language and patterns at our disposal when we write? One of the main reasons that novelists, or short story writers or poets need to read the sort of works that they’re writing is because we need to allow the language and shape and themes of other authors to filter into our many layers of consciousness. All this information simmering away beneath the surface of things. All these secret shapes and themes and patterns are like magical helpers. The eye and brain record so much that we’re not aware when we read.

When I was a girl I had so many secret longings and ambitions I could scarcely hold them all. One was to become a figure skater. Since I lived in a small town in northern Wisconsin, I skated nearly every day in the winter. Often after school I’d come home and practice skating on a bumpy patch of ice on our driveway, then would visit the rink after dinner. I can still see the girl in the driveway as the sun sets and the steel sky settles into dusk. When I think back to some of those overriding emotions what I remember is a lot of frustration and sense of failure that I could not performs spins and moves of ballerina grace.

Then sometime in my adult years I was thinking of my many frustrated girlhood ambitions and realized, that of course, I never progresses as a skater because I never had a teacher to show me the steps. And you know how some times when a realization hits you with a powerful zap and you suddenly understand something important? That understanding was enormously helpful. But writers can find teachers everywhere since it’s never been a better time to be a writer. There are programs that teach craft, hundreds of books written on craft, and then the words of those who have gone before. Who laid down their tracks that can be followed as if they’ve just trekked across fresh snow.

Good fiction often unsettles us, defamiliarizing what we think we know so that we see the world with newly opened eyes. Tony Eprile

My first book, Writing Out the Storm was remaindered by my publisher about a year after it was published because they lost their distributor. Unfortunately, at the time, they didn’t tell me the reason for their decisions, so I was enraged and heart broken. Looking for advice, I called a person who had been in the publishing industry for a while, wailing at the fates, trying to understand what had happened, because when the publisher called with this decision, they also told me how much they loved my book. So my publishing contact told me something I’ve never forgotten, that writing chooses us, we don’t choose it. These days I feel chosen and in sync with my writing and on fire with it. My mornings whiz by and I often need to force myself to quit writing because there are other tasks to accomplish, appointments to keep.

Yesterday I started writing my column for The Willamette Writer about using a writer’s notebook. I also call it an inspiration notebook because it’s the place I gather and glean all that I hear and notice as I go through my days. I use it for plotting out columns and chapters, for recording dreams and overheard conversations, saving quotes, listing vocabulary words I want to use, and savoring wonderfully crafted sentences and phrases I find in whatever I’m reading. Sometimes I paste poems or images or bits that strike my fancy into the pages. I cannot quite express how much I love my various notebooks and how they enrich my writing practice. How this habit brings richness and meaning to my days.

My notebooks are not diaries or journals, do not contain complaints or therapeutic venting. They are repositories, treasure troves. Since I wanted to quote excerpts from my notebooks, I paged through the four most recent ones I’ve been jotting in. And it was like watching home movies of myself as a writer—brimming with life and insights and ideas and wonder at what I found as I stumbled around on this spinning planet. Although I make it a practice to read through them from time to time—often when I go away for a writing retreat at the coast, I was blown away at all I found there. How much I had used them for the books I’ve been writing. How they provide me a place of solidity as I go about my days.

P.S. Another heat wave is starting today. If you don't believe in planetary warming, please stop by and water my flowers, I think the habit might convince you.

There’s a cold front moving through. Last night as I emerged from the theater, fall was in the air and a low-hanging crescent moon hung in the western sky seemed placed there by a genie. I finally went to see the film Wordplay. It’s about Will Shortz the editor of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle, the puzzle’s many fans, and a yearly contest held in Connecticut. It’s directed by Patrick Creadon who did an impeccable job—it’s tightly edited and he makes the whole story involving, tense, while educating and amusing. I was surprised how many times I laughed out loud, how fascinated I was by the puzzler’s minds and lives, and how much I cared about the winner of the annual dust-up. It helped that the film also included celebrity puzzle fans such as Bill Clinton, John Stewart, Ken Burns, and the Indigo Girls.

I listen to Will Shortz every Sunday morning on NPR and he’s always so kind, bright and personable and it was great to put a face to my weekly addiction. And the more I watched the film, the more amazed I was at the brain power of these people. Their vocabularies and general knowledge are amazing and you can practically see their neural passageways speeding faster than the Autobahn. My own vocabulary seems paltry in comparison. Zolaesque? And their homes and work spaces were fascinating and I doubt another film will ever feature so many dictionaries. What a hoot!

Yesterday I scrapped vast swaths of a chapter I was working on and started over—my approach and logic were all wrong. I think the most difficult part of writing an instructional book is to make it entertaining while the logic of the ideas, especially how the ideas build and hang together must be just right. It seems to me that when many people begin writing they imagine it a right brain fiesta, when it’s actually requires a lot of analysis and thoughtful planning.

The morning has dawned cool and hazy, heat is on its way. I won’t bore you with another curse to planetary warming, but I believe that this is Portland’s fifth heat wave of the summer. Enough! I returned home yesterday afternoon from a week at the coast and began immediately mourning the life I was living there. As I unpacked and handled laundry last night I was trying to identify exactly what I was mourning and I realized that besides the endless swath of water, the quality of air, that it was simply how much time I spent out of doors. I walked along the shores in the morning, spent afternoons at the beach reading and building sand castles, and ate dinners on a picnic table with the surf pounding below. I watched every sunset and slept with the window open to the sound of the surf’s lullaby.

I rose each morning and brewed cups of tea and sat at an old table overlooking the ocean and wrote longhand in two notebooks that I’d brought along. Sometimes I jotted down my early morning dreams, but most often I played with ideas for upcoming books. In fact, I made lots of progress on sketching out a plan for a specific book, researched topics for another book, read a client’s short stories and read Dennis Lehane’s short story collection Coronado and Amy Hempl’s Tumble Home. Kept reading Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City and the long-ago Chicago Exposition seemed even more garish and extravagant when read in a vintage beach cottage outfitted in antiques and a massive fireplace with stones gathered from nearby. These morning sessions with the Pacific spread before me in continuous changing blues, the sky so enormous and volatile that it seemed to touch my every thought, were deliciously creative and somehow calming

For months I’ve been playing with ideas in my notebooks, trying to preplan my work more. Natalie Goldberg calls writing by hand a moving meditation and claims that it connects us to a younger self. The writing that happens longhand is much different than what comes out of a computer. Each word is etched at a higher price and at the same time closer to some essential truth of who I am.

These morning sessions started the day with a slowness that I don’t feel in the city. I realized too that so much time spent outdoors reminded me of summers from my childhood which began and ended with time spent outside. With a marvel of plants and stars, with smells of grass and green and flowers. With every sense ignited.

I was nervous about spending a week away from the book I’m working on, but by about the fourth night I was there I realized that a week away was exactly what I needed. We were roasting marshmallows in the fireplace, the rosy sunset had faded to black and K.D. Lang was on the stereo, when I recognized just how relaxed and easy I felt. How my upper back was not knotted from constant typing. How hours spent playing in the sand trying to figure out how to build steps and stories and turrets had quieted my mind. Usually a day that has spent mostly editing and writing doesn’t result in feelings of ease, in fact just the opposite and I often go out walking at night to burn off feelings of unease and stress.

As I thought about the past week, I tried to mentally transplant myself to full-time life at the Oregon coast. I just cannot imagine it because my friends and my daughter’s family are here, because I love theater and concerts, and Powells and the lovely old neighborhood’s in Portland. The parks, the gardens, the farmer’s markets and fabulous restaurant scene. So it seems that I need to figure out how to spend more time at the coast, how to meld writing with ease.

Last night I attended another outdoor concert—the Patrick Lamb Band. Patrick plays the saxophone, writes original music and has a great stage personality, always trying to coerce the crowd to dance and clap and join in. To be part of the music. The sky had remained overcast all day, but then the sunset was amazing—rosy and lavender and mysterious. It looked like a faraway forest fire, like the world was ending or just beginning.

Yesterday I was also interviewed on Oregon Public Broadcasting for a radio show. I had thought it was taped, but it turned out to be a live broadcast and at one point the engineer, who is blind, came into the room, and was groping at instruments, and playing with my microphone so that it was difficult to talk, but overall it went okay. The interviewer, a journalist, asked harder questions than I anticipated. She wanted to know the percentage of writers who I worked with who are published—I honestly don’t know. Her first question was if writing required talent. I answered no, that it’s a craft and as any craft, can be taught. She asked along with curiosity what other traits were required of a writer—and I answered awareness, being a person on whom nothing is wasted. Noticing the colors in the sky, the quality of light as it changes hourly, the vibrant passage of the seasons, interesting people you spot on the streets.

Her question seemed to be aiming at the difficulties of writing, the inner fortress one must build to get words on the page. She wanted to know the most important trait in writers—and I answered persistence. When I explained that I wrote every day and was at my desk by 6 a.m. she gave a low whistle of amazement. The interviewer also talked about the muse, about how some writers claimed that it sort of took over and did the writing for them. I just laughed and said I wished it would visit me, but in its place I build habits to get the work done. That I start my writing day by light editing so that I am engaged with a specific process and then as I begin changing words, grammar and punctuation, before I know it, ideas and inspiration also arrive. That I write early before the day offers its distractions.

When she asked where I get my ideas I explained that many arrive by reading. I mentioned some of the writers I’ve been reading lately—Dennis Lehane’s short story collection Coronado, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Scott Russell Sanders’ essays. And that as I read, I jot down phrases and words that catch my eye and ignite my imagination. The more I read the more I write. And that working with my editing clients teaches me what writers need to know about craft because I’m trying to fill in the gaps of their understanding.

We spent quite a bit of time discussing Voices in the Street—the book I wrote based on interviews with homeless people. And I found that I had already forgotten many of the statistics that I used to know—but my interviewer was surprised when I mentioned that about 35% of homeless people are veterans and that there are already Iraq War/Occupation veterans among them. That the main thing I discovered based on the interviews was that a large percentage of homeless people did not have stable childhoods, even if that meant a parent was in the military and they moved around a lot. Many mentioned that they’d never had a place that meant home to them.

And I was making my tea this morning I was thinking about how I had always searched for a magic solution to being a writer. That like Dorothy, I thought it involved ruby slippers and some sort of divine intervention. Her great longing for home, and knowing her place in her family among the endless flatlands and big sky of Kansas was her answer. And this knowledge was within her all the time. And like Dorothy, I’ve found my place too, it was within me all the time, but it took sitting here morning after morning, no matter the bruised sky, no matter my mood. I found my place by writing.

I have concluded that the whole misfortune of men comes from a single thing, and that is their inability to remain at rest in a room. Pascal

On Sunday night I attended a concert at Washington Park. When we arrived the park was crowded so we perched on top of a hill. Below us, the amphitheater held an orchestra and visiting musicians, Three Legged Torso and behind us soft grasses carpeted the ground and mixed with row after row of roses, and beyond the hillsides were dotted with trees. Washington Park is at the heart of Portland and besides the rose garden of 500 varieties, it houses a Japanese garden that is amazing in all seasons, a zoo, a children’s museum and lies next to Forest Park which is a giant swath, of old growth and second growth trees. Forest Park has 5,000 acres, is ribboned with miles of trails and is the largest urban forest reserve in the country. I write about this because Portland is a place where you can always find a respite and Washington Park, is a place at so genteel and peaceful it seems set apart from the world, perhaps existing in another century, and I can still feel a calm left over from Sunday evening.

I’ve been reading The Devil in the White City and Larson is describing how Frederick Law Olmstead was brought into the organization to design the grounds of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Larson’s such a skilled writer— able to transform piles of research into a narrative and imbue it all with tautness and tension. Olmstead had worked on Central Park, the grounds of Harvard and Yale. I have just discovered that John Olmstead, his brother, came to Portland to refine the design of Washington Park.

Last night I gardened and in one of my restless moods, came upstairs to my office to work on my September newsletter. I had an hour to kill between watering and deadheading flowers and walking at near-dusk. My office chair faces north and a window about six feet wide by feet long, so it always shows a great expanse of sky. Last night the clouds were wisps and feathers brushing against the blue like feathers on a quiet sea, as if the world contains no troubles, no drama. A dance of clouds. A sweep of sky. I had spent much of the day writing, then napped a bit and wandered out to run errands, starting to pick up bits and pieces of things I’ll need for a week at the coast. The day had been hot and the evening was cooling off pleasantly billowing the almond colored drapes.

I was searching my files for a column I was working on when I came across a file I have collected on Scott Russell Sanders, and instead of writing, I spent the hour reading some of his work. He is one of my favorite writers, a superb essayist, and after I read his essay about trying to stay still amid a busy life, I went out walking. He’s the kind of writer whose words and images linger in your imagination, like wine lingers in the blood. I walked and seemed to have an even keener awareness of my surroundings, an acute sensitivity because of his words simmering in my blood.

As I walked last night I puzzled over whether the essay is taken seriously today among writing's many forms. I believe more people should write essays and more places should publish them. They are small gems in the world of words. Here is Sanders, being interviewed on the topic in The Fourth Genre where you can read the entire interview:

Robert L. Root: Annie Dillard has written of the essay: "The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything that a short story can do." Do you agree with that?

Scott Russell Sanders: The essayist certainly can use most of the strategies open to the writer of poetry or fiction—narrative, dialogue, exposition, and so on—but not all of them. Nothing in the essay corresponds to the force of the line in poetry, for example. Nothing in the essay, as I conceive of it, corresponds to the unreliable narrator in fiction. I don't think any one genre is a substitute for the others. We need poems and stories and novels and plays, as well as essays. Each genre offers us paths through the dark woods of this life, and we need all the paths we can find.

RLR: Do you turn to one form or the other because of what it can do or what you need to get done?

SRS: I don't write poetry, although I read it with great pleasure. I made my start as a writer of fiction, and I had finished half a dozen novels or collections of stories before trying my hand at the essay. Once I got the feel of the essay, it began to draw me away from fiction. As I say in my introduction to The Paradise of Bombs, I turned to nonfiction at a time when minimalism and irony and postmodernist games-playing ruled the world of fiction. I was tired of reading stories whose characters and narrators were inarticulate, obtuse, or numb, and I had no desire to write such condescending and stripped-down stuff. Against the vacancy, shallowness, and silliness of so much that was fashionable in stories, the essay appealed to me for its directness and urgency and grace. It seemed to me a form in which one could pursue any question, no matter how difficult, and to which one could bring the full range of intelligence. I keep imagining that I'll return to the writing of stories and novels, but for the present I'm still absorbed, still challenged, by the essay.

RLR: A number of writers have emphasized the relationship between the devices and strategies of creative nonfiction and those of fiction, but some others have emphasized the relationship between creative nonfiction and poetry. They think of the essay as principally a lyrical form rather than a narrative form. What associations do you make between these established literary genres and the fourth genre of nonfiction?

SRS: The essay is a capacious genre, with room enough for lyrical as well as narrative forms. Because of my own training in fiction, I often use narrative strategies in organizing my essays?scenes, character sketches, dramatic gestures, plot, and so on. But I also frequently organize essays by a logic more common in poetry?using a sequence of governing metaphors, for example, or fashioning a collage of images, or playing up the role of the speaker's voice, or relying on patterns of sound to bind together seemingly disparate materials.
RLR: You remarked in "The Singular First Person" about being "bemused and vexed to find one of my own essays treated in a scholarly article as a work of fiction . . . . To be sure, in writing the piece I had used dialogue, scenes, settings, character descriptions, the whole fictional bag of tricks; sure, I picked and chose among a thousand beckoning details; sure, I downplayed some facts and highlighted others; but I was writing about the actual, not the invented. I shaped the matter, but I did not make it up." What limits of creativity and accuracy do you apply to the essay?

SRS: The line between fiction and nonfiction may be fuzzy when seen from the outside, by the reader, but from the inside, from the writer's perspective, it seems to me quite clear. When I write what we're calling creative nonfiction, I feel bound by an implicit contract with the reader: I don't invent episodes, don't introduce characters who were not actually present, don't deliberately change circumstances. Of course I may change circumstances without knowing I've done so, because memory and perception are tricksters. We all realize that no two people, confronted by the same event, will see exactly the same thing; we realize that memory shapes and edits our past. So when I sit down to write about actual events and places and people, I don't imagine that I can give a flawless transcript, but I do feel an obligation to be faithful to what I've witnessed and what I recall. In writing nonfiction, I feel an obligation to a reality outside the text; in writing fiction, I feel no such obligation.

(later in the interview)

RLR: Particularly when there are so many influences in what anyone reads and so many voices you may ultimately have, how do you tune your ear for your voice?

SRS: For better or worse, I spend more hours a day writing my own prose than reading anybody else's. I think you grow into your voice on the page, just as you grow into your body. A singer performs with his or her body; the body is an instrument, and each body, if developed to its full power and subtlety, produces a unique sound. When I'm composing, and sorting through those dozens of sentences in my head for every one that I put down on paper, I still hear plenty of false notes, but I discard them. I'm listening for what sounds right, what sound true, what carries conviction. That's not to say I never hit a false note, never lapse into imitation, but I think I do so less often nowadays because I test everything against my stubborn sense of who I actually am.

Saturday morning has dawned cloudy and cool again but hot weather is on its way tomorrow. Yes, I’m obsessed with weather. I just finished writing a long chapter in my bad guys book, 14,000 words and logged in at least 6,000 words this week. Writing is much easier when sweat isn’t running down my thighs and when the early morning sun does not beckon me from my desk, urging me to take off on errands or garden, or simply sit on the patio with the sun warm as a blanket on my skin. It’s been a quiet week, long hours spent at my computer, a concert in a local park—Linda Hornbuckle, a shopping trip with my daughter, chatting on the phone with friends, walking through the neighborhood at dusk, noting who has and hasn’t been watering.

Meanwhile, today at Heathrow a third of the flights were cancelled and the latest rounds of terrorist’s threats and new travel sanctions and more fear-mongering by the Bush administration are threatening my sanity. The right wing talk Nazis are already spreading lies that somehow link the Bushies to landing the bad guys. The truth is, Bush who after last August’s Katrina fiasco is curtailing his vacation yet busy cutting brush in Crawford—don’t get me started about his capabilities. Lieberman is going to run as an independent in November and if I think about it too much or listen too often to Mike Malloy, I feel like I’m drowning in a sad and dangerous farce. And is it just me, but isn’t traveling without bottled water, toothpaste, and lipstick going a bit too far? Nest, we’ll all be strapped into our seats naked…..oh well, onto the writing life.

Yesterday I finished reading Anita Shreve’s latest novel, A Wedding in December. At first I wasn’t as enchanted with the story as I have been with some of her previous novels, but then as usual, she grabbed me. Light on Snow, an earlier novel, is simply amazing, so sensuous and moving that the story has never left me. Her new novel doesn’t start out quite as captivatingly and because it has several viewpoint characters, is at first, not as emotionally gripping. However, I’ve noticed that Shreve is comfortable writing in any century but her research never overpowers the story, and I always learn something about another era. In A Wedding in December, one of her characters is writing a short story about a fascinating bit of history. It describes a terrible explosion in the Halifax harbor that killed and blinded thousands of citizens and almost demolished the city.

But Shreve always writes about the tenderest and most vulnerable regions of the human heart and the theme of this story is regret. Thus several characters are all wracked with regret for choices they’ve made—especially choosing or turning back from love. So love lost and found is another central theme. In fact, the marriage that takes place is between two high school sweethearts who get back together in their forties after meeting at a reunion. But, because Shreve never makes life easy for her characters and often writes bittersweet tales, the bride has an aggressive form of cancer and her chances for survival are not good. And because Shreve is a master yarn spinner, she’s got a secret at the heart of the story, it’s revealed at the last moment, and it’s linked to the theme.

Although I’m mostly reading fiction these days, I’m going to attend a book club in a few weeks so just bought Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. Larson is the author of Isaac’s Storm and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I heard him interviewed on NPR. It’s nonfiction and it’s about the World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893. It’s also about a serial killer who went on a killing spree during this time. I’ve been combing my memory from my last trip to Chicago, trying to understand which buildings from the exposition still exist in Chicago.

It’s a city of such fabulous architecture; just a joy to wander through and gaze at all the architectural styles and to look upward at the gargoyles. Always feeling Lake Michigan in all its moods. Larson is a meticulous researcher, but knows how to use narrative drive and tension. He’s also carefully using the language of the era to lend it all more resonance and believability. In the opening I was particularly struck by a startling statistic: in the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly 800 violent deaths. Now I wonder how that compares to the first six months in Baghdad this year? I think they’ve got Chicago of old beat.

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer. ~ Stephen Leigh

So I was sitting in the bar at the Airport Sheraton on late Saturday afternoon of the Willamette Writer’s conference—the place is really slick now that it’s remodeled-- and nursing a lovely glass of Cabernet and chatting a bit with the bartender and a few other people seated at the bar. The woman sitting next to me had written two novels, one had been published, her second was coming out in early 2007. I’m not sure about her publisher—I know it wasn’t a major publisher, but I’m also not certain if it’s the sort where the author pays fees or not.

Anyway, she was sipping a Heffeweizen, then at the appointed hour whisked off to pitch a screenplay. She returned ten minutes later looking flushed and when I asked her what had happened she said she’s been shot down—fast—by the fact that the screenplay takes place on three continents. Now, I already liked her because she was spunky and well, because she’s a writer, my tribe, so I’m not going to write “duh” here, but you get the idea. A first time screenwriter should write a fabulous story, but it should not be expensive to produce. I tried to explain this to a client some years ago who had a climatic scene that involved more pyrotechnics than World War II. The client, who was using her 20-something’s son’s name to gain an edge in youth-obsessed Hollywood, refused to believe me even though her screenplay was simply pricey to produce.

The novelist ordered another beer and since I was still nursing my wine and wondering where I could buy the same sort of glass I was drinking out of (it’s stemware without stems—very chic) and had already heard a short version of the bartender’s life story, so I asked her why she had written a screenplay. She replied because she had already written fiction and she thought she’d try something new. Now, I’m the last person to advise against venturing off into new turf, but I also think there’s a point where you plan a career with a practical eye (especially for people over forty) and get pragmatic about how you’re going to spend your time. I didn’t ask her long it took her to write the screenplay, but it seems to me that if you’re already writing in a genre and you’ve attracted readers to your first book, you want to deliver your readers another and another and keep the stuff coming. Think of how Janet Evanovich’s fans wait each June for the latest installment of Stephanie Plum’s adventures. Will she or won’t she sleep with Ranger this time and if she doesn’t, please dear God, can I?

I also told her I didn’t know the odds of Hollywood buying a screenplay, but if your odds of having your nonfiction published are 10,000 to 1, then your odds of getting a novel published are 100,000 to 1, and consequently your odds of getting a screenplay produced are a million to one. I don’t care what anyone says, writing screenplays is the ultimate crap shoot and if you write novels or short stories or articles, you should get established at that first so that people other than your mother and your writing group know about your words and then, once you’re practically a household name, figure out a way to snag a manager in Hollywood. If you don’t have Hollywood contacts, you’re probably not getting in. And if you’re over 30 your chances diminish with each second ticking away.

I’m not completely cynical, I’m really not. But while the novelist was off pitching the guy next to me at the bar and I started talking about wine. I have been thinking about dabbling in wine writing again and he said he writes about wine too—a column aimed at the hip hop crowd. He said that he likes to write about how none of the rules about wine hold true any more and that people should drink white wine with red meat or whatever they wanted. Now, I don’t claim to be the world’s expert of wine, but I have a lot of contacts in the industry and know my way around a cork. A nice pinot noir can taste lovely with salmon and a white wine can be paired with all sorts of things, but there are reasons why some wine marriages exist and red wine and red meat are paired for all sorts of reasons, but especially to balance out flavors and robustness of both wine and meat.

And he was telling me his readers knew nothing about wine, I’m thinking that they were being ill-served by his advice and perhaps if he researched a bit more and maybe called some local winemakers (there are plenty in this region to confer with), perhaps his column would have more merit. Then when the novelist-turned-screenwriter got shot down for three continents in a screenplay, well, I just think that’s time that we all stop talking about the creativity of writing and talk more about the business of writing. If you’re a writer, you are a business person who just happens to write. Words are your product and they need to be deadly accurate before they go into print and well conceived before you toss off months of your free time into a project that will never go anywhere.

A few years ago my career was in a slump due to a passel of health problems. There were five months when I had traction treatments every day and I’d come home each afternoon and lay on the floor watching the sun track through the room while my bones settled into place, in too much pain to sit or do much of anything. Then I was able to have the treatments only three times a week and then one day I explained to my doctor that I was going to stop the treatment because my body needed a break and I was going to learn to live with my bone spurs and deteriorating discs and all my other health problems because I wanted to start moving forward again.

During that time I had an agent, but my book ideas weren’t selling and I was starting to research other writing ideas that I hoped has a lot of potential. I wrangled a phone consultation with another agent because I wanted another perspective on my career and she starting shooting down my ideas one by one. “That’s an article, not a book” she said of my favorite. Then she went on to explain that she advises all her writers under contract to stick with the market they’re established in for as long as they can. So I did. Right now I write for writers, but someday I’ll write for a wider audience. Until then, I’m going to take all I know about craft and persistence and the qualities need to get things on the page and spread the gospel of how writing gets done. So here’s what I think: If you have a market or readership, stick with it. And if you establish yourself as an expert by writing a column, know what the hell you’re writing about.

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true. ~ Woodrow Wilson

It’s 10 a.m. and Garrison Keilor’s dulcet tones are spilling into the room, chatting about writers and in a moment, he’ll read a poem. Just yesterday, I was putting away my farmer’s market loot and listening to a rerun of A Prairie Home Companion and thinking about what a rich and interesting career he’s concocted. He looks like he’s having a grand time, doesn’t he? I’ve just written 2,000 words on a chapter on character and I’ve reached a point where I don’t know if I have more to say on the subject yet today. I’m thinking of jumping into a new project or working on a client’s manuscript.

This past weekend was the Willamette Writer’s Conference and I’m so glad it was over because I now have two weeks for writing and editing without too many distractions, then I’ve heading off to the wide, wide waters of the Pacific to empty out my mind for a week. At the conference I taught two new workshops—one on subplots and one on theme and premise. And while I wrote a chapter about these subjects in my book, I still needed to spend a lot of time preparing my lecture notes and creating handouts. Also, the chapter on subplots is my least favorite chapter—I wrote it last and was burned out and am going to hand in some revisions on it for next edition. Someone also pointed out a discrepancy in my subplot handout because it claimed that they can occur in backstory. Actually, subplots happen within the time frame of the front story but can be influenced by backstory if actions from the past cause new events in the now. The back story generally is not a subplot—so just wanted to throw in that clarification in case anyone is reading this attended my workshop.

The conference seemed to go fairly well except for one major snafu. The banquet room where lunch and dinner is served is also where the consultations with the editors and agents take place. On Friday after lunch the room didn’t not get cleared promptly and the consults appointments were delayed by one and half hours and the scheduling turned into a nightmare. When I walked into the door of the hotel on Friday afternoon to teach my workshop, I passed through the waiting area. I was amazed at how the tension was palatable and now I understand that it was the usual tension magnified by delay and frustration.

I receive e-mail missives from writers all the time about wanting to break into writing. Many have gone the route of sending out 50 or more manuscripts and garnered a bruising stack of rejections. The way to get published is to attend and/or volunteer at conferences and meet these gatekeepers face to face. If you can manage to not have a maniacal look in your eye you might also be able to chat them up in the bar or hallway. The publishing world is a business built on contacts and after your first job is to write something that is polished, amazing and marketable, your second job is to make contacts. Conferences aren’t the only way to do this, but they are the easiest.

Meanwhile, I ran into quite a few of my students there—people pitching, attending workshops, hanging out. Some had fallen behind in their writing because of family pressures, some were on fire with new enthusiasm and one student’s second novel is coming out in September. It’s always interesting to track who is still carrying the flame, who keeps trying no matter what, and who just sort of hangs out at the outskirts of the writing life, dabbling or pretending.

The energy at the writer’s conference is often as intense as a thunder storm, and while conferences are uplifting and enlightening and energizing, there is also something about all that raw ambition and longing that can be extremely draining. I’m glad to be back at my desk, while taking breaks to water my flowers and herbs, pluck off dead flower heads (a practice that is much more cathartic than it sounds), go for walks around the neighborhood and generally enjoy the quiet of my writing life.

I learn by going where I have to go. -Theodore Roethke, The Waking

The marine air has swept into town again—I love these cool mornings when anything seems possible, when the colors are softened and misty. It’s like the world takes a looong time waking up, brushing away the clouds like you brush off sleep, allowing the sun to join the party like a guest who always arrives late. Since I’ve lived in Portland these last 15 years, I’ve come to appreciate the subtler shades of sky, the paler permutations of blue and all the shades of gray from battleship to silver.

There’s always so much to do when you return from a trip. At this point I’m so busy with projects that I cannot imagine traveling in Europe for weeks and then returning to resume my life. Right now, I’ve got too much writing to do and so my next trip is going to be a week at the Oregon coast and I’m already worrying that the week away will set me too far behind in my projects. However despite my concerns, I plan on not doing much—walking on the beach, watching the sun set while sipping wine and listening and watching birds twittering their bedtime routines, reading and eating and recharging. In the past few days I unpacked, answered e-mails, sorted through things, wrote lists and ministered to my flower beds where slugs seems to have settled in to feast and feast and feast some more. I must start setting out beer-filled traps—somehow I keep forgetting….

Yesterday I put together notes on subplots for a workshop I’m going to teach at the Willamette Writers Conference this weekend. Today I’m working on my workshop on theme and premise. Although I wrote chapters on the topics in my book Between the Lines, I want to say something new in my workshops and I’m combing through my bookcases for books I’ve read recently to illustrate my points.

Meanwhile, I’m writing my column and newsletter and plugging away on a chapter on creating memorable characters for my upcoming book. So I think that what’s the writing life comes down to—first, you set up some kind of schedule or routine and you stick with it. A routine makes it all easier and your layers of consciousness will summon some genie within and make the writing easier if you write at the same time every day. However, you also juggle your schedule when necessary (many authors must travel regularly to conferences and for promotional tours) while keep your writing projects in the forefront of your thoughts even when you’re not working on them, snatching minutes and hours here and there for writing, jotting down everything important that you see every time you see it. Writing goals are often not accomplished in long swaths of time, hours spent at the computer in one sitting. When my students or workshop participants complain about their schedules I explain that most first and second books are written by people who are also working a full-time job. I also explain that not everyone has Stephen King’s schedule, although every writer who is serious about their future sees it as a job. Ultimately you’ll log in many hours to complete a book, but you need to know that they’re not all written in a 9-5 schedule. Not all writers can spend eight hours a day writing. Many are like me and write in the morning and spend afternoons editing or taking care of the business of writing. So on to writing, then I’ll be assembling my notes on theme and premise.

Well I’m finally back at my desk with the radio on (Air America) and a cup of Earl Grey tea at hand. It sounds like the morning traffic is a mess and includes an injured goose….After the blistering heat of Indiana, the cool air here feels like diving into a deep, cold stream. This morning I actually closed windows because the morning air was too chilly and it looks like the weather forecast is calling for moderate temperatures for the next week….I’m so grateful.

I returned from the Midwest Writer’s Conference last night and after watering my many pots and flowerbeds (two huge pots of fuchsias in the front are looking increasingly sickly but the rest are fine) I settled onto my couch to finish the last chapters of Sue Miller’s Lost in the Forest. I had picked it up at the Indianapolis airport and it kept me interested as my planes (there was a stopover in Denver) headed west.

It’s the story of a family in turmoil and has three viewpoint characters. It begins in the middle at a point of crisis—the sudden accidental death of a secondary character, John (always a good place to begin a novel) and then flashes back in time, moves forward, and ends in the present. But what’s most interesting about the structure is that it begins in the viewpoints of Mark and Eva—the parents in a family, and at first it appears that the story is about them and their marriage and divorce. But then chapter four slips into Daisy’s viewpoint and Miller starts slipping in a series of surprises and twists. Daisy is their pre-teenage daughter and at an awkward stage when her viewpoint is introduced and as the story continues, her predicament has the most conflict in it and reader interest. The reason her story is most important and intriguing is that she’s the most vulnerable character in the story.

I taught three fiction workshops at the Midwest Conference and in each one mentioned that fiction is about vulnerability. In the Reader’s Guide section of the book Miller writes: “I wanted to have Daisy uniquely vulnerable to the events of her family’s life. Her shyness, her unattractiveness at the moment of the story, her greater vulnerability to her parents’ divorce and the birth of Theo, her greater devastation at John’s death—all those mean that she’s very fragile, very in need at exactly the moment when her parents, too are most fragile and in need….”

I rest my case. Vulnerability, fragility, along with physical danger are deliciously involving in fictional characters, keeping us tuned in and turning pages.

So last night I experienced what the word “sea change” means. It was about 8 o’clock and the temperature finally starting dropping for the first time in days. I had been lying on the couch reading Chang-rae Lee’s gorgeous novel Aloft with a fan aimed at me, when something drew me to the window and I realized that marine air was arrivng. I immediately started opening windows, installing fans, adjusting my hopes. Besides watering my plants, this preoccupation with trying to maximize cool air while blocking out hot air has kept me busy throughout this heat wave.

I took my book to the patio with a glass of decent rose’ and turned on the sprinkler. It whizzed an arc of spray, the water thrumming against a drain pipe and fence, with damp, earthy smells rising, all reminding me of childhood. I stayed outside sipping and reading, taking breaks to deadhead flowers and tend plants until it was too dark to see anything. I’ve missed being outdoors these past days.

After running errands yesterday I slipped into a theater to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. As I walked across the parking lot pavement the heat felt punishing and frightening and I mentioned to the woman taking money at the box office that watching the movie seemed appropriate under the current weather conditions, but she was confused by my statement. In case there are many among us who don’t believe in the global warming, this film will convince you. The more I listened to the thoughtful and articulate Gore, the more I wondered what the country and world would be like if he were running the country, if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.

When I returned from the film I started telling my across the street neighbor about it. I am flying to Indiana tomorrow to teach workshops at the Midwest Writing Conference and I asked him to water my plants while I’m away. We don’t know each other well but from time to time get together in his yard or mine to talk politics. He was a drill sergeant during the Vietnam War and the experience of readying young men for a frivolous, unwinable war changed him. He told me last night that he’s got a deep feeling in his gut that the country is ready for a violent revolution—that corruption in government and in big business will drive people to rise up. He’s especially incensed about companies that get away with ripping off their employees’ pensions. One of his hunting buddies worked for PGE (a subsidiary of Enron) for 45 years and his pension of almost a million dollars simply disappeared. His friend claims there are no words to describe his loss and rage.

I countered that I sense just the opposite—an apathy so pervasive and stultifying that it will probably take gas prices rising to $5 a gallon (not impossible to imagine with conditions in the Middle East such as they are) to rouse people from their stupor, their hundreds of cable channels and beer. I don’t have answers but this heat is ominous and we need sane, grown up leadership and decision makers. I am reminded of a conversation I had with the novelist Anne Perry last October at the Surrey Conference in B.C. As we discussed politics and the state of the world, I told her that I thought the heart of the problem worldwide was a failure of leadership. Then we both tried to think of a world leader who we respected and were stumped. Mike Slade, an author and lawyer joined us at the table and he too could not offer a name. And so it goes. Today it might reach 90 again, but at least the evening and morning are cool.

In times of war the truth is so precious it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. Winston Churchill

This is day four of another heat wave. Today is supposed to be a blistering 96 or 98 degrees with humidity of 51%. (Makes me wonder how hot it is in Iraq today. How the heat feels when you’re wearing Kevlar or whatever protective vests are made of. That is, if there are enough vests to go around….) One of the reasons I live in Portland is to avoid hot weather and humidity. Give me clouds any day and curses to the fools who don’t believe in global warming.

Last night I hung out with a friend in his air conditioned condo. I brought take-out Thai food and we watched Syriana. I’m still thinking about the movie and along with the heat, it invaded my dreams last night and into the dawn. I might watch it again because the plots twists, quick scene jumps, and large cast were a bit difficult to track. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a bleak political thriller about oil, terrorism, money, and power. Interestingly, lots of mention of Iran and Hezbollah and scenes shot in Beirut (which I doubt is recognizable now that Israel is bombing the hell out of it). After watching the film with all its scheming and hypocrisy played out, you’re pretty sure the shenanigans between Washington, the Middle East oil cartels and American and multi-national oil companies are all depressingly accurate. It was directed by Stephen Gaglan who also directed Traffic and stars George Clooney (also a producer), Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright with roles by William Hurt, Christopher Plummer, Amanda Peet, and the always great Chris Cooper. Gaglan wrote the screenplay based on a book by Robert Baer.

I’m left wondering why Clooney gained so much weight for his role and if he’s still living in France these days. Now if Clooney would run for president, he’s an actor I’d vote for. A thinking girl’s sex symbol; a patriot because he cares about the country and its constitution; and overall modest and interesting man. Thank goodness someone is still making movies about the truth of our times.

Meanwhile NPR is droning on about the latest air strikes and death counts in Lebanon. This is Day 11 and Condoleeza Rice is finally heading to the Middle East for talks. This mishandling and dull-witted, tone deaf, bungling approach is Katrina all over again. Did I mention that heat makes me cranky and I hate this corrupt and inept administration?

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity. William Hazlitt

Last night I was sitting on the ground at Cathedral Park listening to music and gazing across the river at the wide and graceful span of the St. Johns bridge. It’s an amazing bridge—medieval and timeless in design and when I’m around it, I feel transported back in time. Perhaps this sense has been influenced by my reading George R. R. Martin’s series set in the faraway and long-ago Seven Kingdoms. I’m on the fourth book and so caught up in the twists and troubles of the sprawling cast, that it’s difficult to not read…. But anyway, I’ve been thinking about grace and lately I’ve been noticing my lack of it. Here’s why:

In the past month or so I have broken my toe, injured my back, had an allergy attack of such severity that it I had to rush in for immediate tests because it felt like I was having a stroke and heart attack at the same time, my computer died, my waistline expanded, I missed an appointment to be interviewed on public radio because I forgot to write it down, drove one and half hours through a traffic jam for a book signing/ mini-lecture attended by three people who did not buy copies of my book, had a panic attack while driving along a zigzag mountain pass at 5000 feet, took a break from talking to a family member because her mental illness makes me want to smash habanera peppers into my eyes, and while reapplying lipstick outdoors in daylight saw such a haggard visage that I feared someone might land a house on me and wrest my ruby slippers from my curling toes.

Meanwhile, I’ve never caught up on my paperwork, have racked up some impressive medical bills, forgot to check the “do not send” boxes on my club notices, am falling behind in writing my book although a preliminary deadline is looming in a few months, have not sent my agent the proposal I promised her in June, went on a shopping spree when my bank account was anemic, ranted “Don’t you read?” along with other bits of outrage when one of my dearest friends proclaimed there was no such thing as global warning, have counseled several perfectly lovely writers that the manuscript that they’ve been slaving over needs a complete rewrite, developed yet another sinus infection that felt like a sadist was jamming an ice pick into my left nostril and eye, had a bad reaction to an antibiotic, and endured a heat wave without air conditioning.

So if you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, been recently in a head-on collision, or are in the midst of a bitter divorce, things might not look so bad at my end of the street. But for some of you, you might realize that I’m going through a dark night of the soul that will take a certain amount of grace to navigate. I’ve wallowed through times much worse than this one, and have looked back and wished I’d handled myself with more grace. So I’m trying to readjust to quell myself when I start whining, but mostly to rein in my thoughts, especially the bitter and angry ones, before they take over my mind like wildfire.

Grace isn’t one of my best attributes—I’ve got lousy depth perception and eyes that don’t match so I walk into things (hence the broken toe), I brood, have terrible allergies and a lousy immune system so thus have reason for self pity, spend a lot of time alone and even though I know better, often see the worst in people. I’m the type of person who wakes up in the cold light of dawn regretting something she blurted out the previous evening after the main course. I’ve been known to hold a grudge, swear at rude drivers in front of small children, make snap judgments later reversed, gossip, and nurse slights like a playground nerd picking at a scab. I can remember nightmares from when I was three, and the various traumas, heartbreaks and missed opportunities that make up my history. I often forget to count my blessings, look for silver linings, and or keep on the sunny side of the street.

I’ve frequently fallen from grace and it makes me feel small and uneasy. And I think that grace is related to writing, just as most everything is related to writing. I’m not talking about the religious concept of grace that means mercy, but rather the broader definition. The word has Middle English, Latin, Greek, and French origins meaning everything from beloved and effortlessness and artfulness. It is related to gratus and gratitude. In Greek mythology, Grace is depicted in the three sister goddesses, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who dispense charm and beauty and are favorite subjects for sculptors. When I’ve come across statues of any of this trio, I’ve paused at their fluidity that is somehow imposed on marbles, symmetry of beauty and charm. Grace is also defined as elegance and beauty of movement or expression, a disposition to kindness and compassion, benign good will.

Because although it might sound like I need a horse whisperer for my clumsy soul, I actually think I’m getting better at grace all the time and because I meet people who embody it and read writers who make me want to reach for it. And because even when I’m hobbling along in pain or sweating through a heat wave, there is always a part of me that cannot be tarnished. This part always notices things to write about and chats away with strangers and laughs a lot, and remembers to say thank you and relishes reading and finds the caress of summer air unspeakably delicious. And feels an enormous amount of compassion for most people muddling around on this rotating planet, especially writers and artists.

I don’t have a formula for grace but I think it’s part humor, part compassion, part resiliency, part generosity and part relishing life in all its shades of black, blue and golden. It is the outward expression of your inner zen and love of life. My graceful self is willowy and patient and always kind to myself. It is part Buddha, part giggling toddler, part downhill skier in the zone. Grace seems to come to me when I most need it like a parched ground needs rain. Grace is when you carry on when you want to whine, when you write when you want to slack off and watch reality television, when you negotiate with your child rather than issue threats and ultimatums,

I’m inspired toward grace by other writers I know, especially those who are coping with bad luck of the draw. I know a woman who left a bad marriage, then reinvented her life with a new job, a new band, and a new methods of dealing with an autistic son. I’ve recently been contacted by a writer who wrote to my as he was reading my book and described how he was hit by a drunk driver traveling at 75 miles an hour. When he awoke from a two-week coma his short-term memory was gone. But he’s just written a book designed to help people with brain injuries; while yet another writer I know who was severely injured by a drunk driver gives talks around the country to teens. I know a woman who was dumped by her husband and doesn’t look back with regrets and instead conjured her first book deal and is off on a road trip that she calls a bliss quest. I know another writer who treats her husband with kindness even during the times he tries to drink himself to death and yet another writer friend who is caring for her brain-damaged husband at home after he was pronounced dead for twelve minutes.

Because of the circumstances of their lives, most of these writers cannot write as much as they want to, or even take vacations from their troubles. But I see grace etched in their every caring gesture, coating their brave hearts.

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward; for there you have been, and there you long to return. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Last night I was driving home around ten from playing mahjongg. I had won that evening and it was the fifth time I played and I was finally getting the hang of the game, even the complicated scoring system. The game has a certain mystique carried over from past centuries and you begin the game by being assigned one of the four directions and building a wall of tiles. Last year I wrote a book on the I Ching and while researching the topic and Taoism in general, I thought a lot about the differences between the philosophies of the East and West.

With these thoughts tickling my mind, I came to a stretch of the road and ahead me was a low-hanging full moon, that was so huge and magical that I gasped at the sight of it. It was not as burnished as a harvest moon, but still had a pale golden hue, and was gleaming and mysterious as a fever dream. When I reached home I went out to my patio to hang out, bathing in the moonglow, but I could only see it by standing tiptoe and peering over the fence. Disappointed, I went to bed to read but from time to time would peek out the blinds at it, still touched by its magic.

Yesterday I finished reading George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords which is book three in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Before the mahjongg game, I tried to buy book four but the bookstore I visited didn’t have a copy so I’ll visit Powells, always a treat to bask in this bastion of books and words. I’ve rarely read fantasy because I prefer fiction that’s more reality based, but this remarkable series has opened my eyes to the potential in all storytelling. To the basic drives in humankind that can be told with sword fights and wolves and castles. Each of the three books weigh in at 900+ pages and is centered around a theme—the first book A Game of Thrones is about honor, the A Clash of Kings about power and the third book betrayal. The scope of Martin’s imagination, which includes a complicated society, royal families and a cast of hundreds, is simply inspiring. The books include maps of the north and south sections of the kingdom and an appendix with complicated lists of royal families, sworn brothers of the Watch (a three hundred- mile wall that keeps the northern tribes of wildings out) outlaws and other houses.

Martin began writing as kid and sold his stories to neighborhood kids and was first published when he was 21. This lifelong apprenticeship is easily noted in his work which is as finely crafted as an ancient tapestry. I’ve started wondering if there is some way I can interview him or contact him. But here are his words about why he writes fantasy:

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth."

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford

A few nights ago I attended a concert at a new park in the Portland area, Foothills Park in Lake Oswego. It lies between downtown Lake Oswego and the Willamette River and was created from industrial land that was recently purchased. The park has been landscaped with care and walking around it, you can imagine that in five or ten years when the plantings and trees are more mature that it will be a sweet haven of green and wind-tossed trees. A sculpture that commemorates the poet William Stafford sits at the north edge of the park, along a path that winds above the river. It was designed by artist Frank Boyden and is a grouping of lean, vertical stones that creates connections between the river and nature and Stafford's work. Lines from his poetry such as “the stream is always revising” and “water is always ready to learn” are etched into the stones and seem to coax the reader to absorb Stafford’s ideas and the vista at the same time.

One of the stones has this complete poem etched into it:
You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life-What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? William Stafford

Since I visited the park I’ve been thinking about Stafford’s work and legacy, about the example he lived. How he moved here from Kansas and adopted the West and gloried in the land here. I’ve been especially thinking about how he was a conscientious objector during World War II and served in a conservation corps as his sentence. He wrote about those experiences and he wrote a poem every morning including the day he died in 1993. I wonder what he’d think about these political times when "liberal" has been coined as an obscenity; where Americans are being spied on by their government; where elections are stolen and compromised; and laws, including the Geneva Convention, tossed aside for the convenience of furthering corruption and consolidating power. I wonder what sort of poems he’d write in the midst of all this, what we –poets and novelists and screenwriters—should be writing in brave response.

So I broke my toe a few days ago and last night decided to stay home from fourth of July festivities so I could rest. If someone or something brushes against it, the pain is awful and I don’t want to imagine what will happen if someone steps on it. Tonight I’m attending an outdoor concert and can only wear flip-flops, so I’ll try to guard my foot from the crowd. I bashed it into the edge of an antique chest on Saturday night and well, there’s not much you can do with a broken toe except bandage it to its neighbor toe and try to stay off your feet.

Since I’ve already mastered editing while sprawled on the couch, I can handle this but am getting behind in my exercise program. I cannot remember the last time I stayed home on the fourth of July, but it seems that that they invented a lot of new fireworks since then. My neighborhood erupted in them last night and one device sounded so much like a bomb going off that I felt like I was living in Baghdad.

Years ago, when I first moved to the Northwest, I visited my brother for the fourth. My brother lives in the Yakima valley and grows wine grapes and cherries on 120 acres. That July we attended a pig roast-luau at one of his friend’s home. Most of his friends work in the wine industry and gather regularly for dinners and parties where remarkable wines are served. I remember the pig had been wrapped in imported banana leaves and our host was groggy and silly since he’d been up the night before tending it. I remember that I had pitched in and helped carve it and felt transported back in time to a medieval feast as I sawed flesh off the huge beast.

There were probably 100 people at the party and later at dusk, I was holding a baby named Guy while the Rolling Stones blasted from the stereo. Guy was about six months old and chubby and dark haired and good natured and adorable. At the time I hadn’t held a baby in years and his heft and smell were familiar and lovely. We were standing out on the road—the couple lived in the country outside a small town and in the distance the fireworks display from town began. The fireworks were perhaps a mile away and as each one erupted into the night sky Guy would coo and sigh and arch his tiny body at the thrill of the glittering display. I’ve never forgotten the newness of his experience and his appreciation of the bedazzled sky.

I think a lot about tricks for living well and how some of these tricks I’m still trying to master and some I don’t know if I ever will. But several I’m good at—living with awareness and trying to see things with the eyes of a child. For some people it’s not possible to hang out with children and slip into their world view so you must do it on your own. Because this freshness of view is like your first fireworks, your first ice cream, your first carnival. If you live with newness and awareness the smallest outing like a trip to the grocery store becomes an opportunity to really see the goods and people and feel the chilled air of the freezer section and notice all the giddy colors of the fruits and vegetables in the produce section. If it’s all new and if you’re noticing all the time, everything becomes an adventure.

It’s officially a holiday weekend, hot but not blistering and I've been writing since I awoke except for a few breaks for laundry and meals. I've got one more writing project on today's to-do list and then I'm heading out for errands and just to take a break.

Last night I invited two of my former students over for dinner and we sat in my back yard until midnight the crescent moon winking overhead talking about writing and divorce and special diets and trust and men and writing. Athena brought her laptop and showed us photos of her recent road trips including one where her red Jeep is parked within the crotch of a giant redwood. She talked about her blog (www.theblissquest.com) her book deal to write ghost stories about Seattle, and brought along a notebook so filled with life and color and art and whimsy that I wanted to steal it on the spot.

The other writer Mary fretted about finding time to write between working full time, commuting too many hours, playing in a band, and taking care of a dog and special-needs son. She also owns a home and is thinking of buying smaller one, with a more manageable yard as one solution. She described an incident when her son locked her out of the house and she was forced to call the fire department. How when they were breaking into her house, a fireman informed her that her gutters needed cleaning and they were causing water to leak into her basement.
So she hired a kid to clean the gutters, but it’s all a lot to cope with and write too and meanwhile, her agent might send out her novel again if she was working on a new one.

At times like this, when really nice writers deserve a break, I wish I was a millionaire or a fairy god mother. I’d grant Mary a year or two off from work so she could settle into a new novel and I’d provide a gardener and pay for day care for her son. When I was kid there was a television program on the air called The Millionaire. Each episode began with Dali-esque swirling graphics that sort of made you dizzy watching them, as if you were falling into the television set. The concept of the series was that each week the millionaire, John Beresford Tipton, would anonymously give someone a million dollars through his assistant and then the story evolved around the ramifications of this generosity. The millionaire’s associate, the actor Marvin Miller as Michael Anthony, would deliver a tax-free cashier's check on the condition that they never try to discover who sent it, or reveal where the money came from, except to their husband or wife.

Anthony was often on the sidelines as newly-minted millionaires would often run into trouble because of their wealth, sometimes learning hard truths such as money can't buy happiness. The episodes would end with Anthony reporting to his boss about the lessons that the recipients learned. Like Rod Serling’s brilliant series The Twilight Zone of the same period, it managed to deliver drama without being preachy or moralistic.

Some days I have so many yearnings that I can scarcely sit down to write or keep my wits about me. Just this morning I was thinking that if I’d studied math and science more in school I would have loved to work in brain research. The older I get and the more I witness about how people screw up their lives, the more I want to know the brain’s role in our sorrows. Or maybe that’s just a way to acknowledge how difficult writing can be.

But back to Mary and other time-starved writers. Sometimes there are no simple solutions for a crowded life. You try to write the best you can, snatching moments here and there. Parents of young children often must scrabble together writing time like kisses stolen in church. You carry a notebook all the time, all the time. You write when you’re tired and on your lunch hour. But you don’t put it off until the children are grown and the mortgage is paid. I’ve met a lot of these writers who waited until retirement or they had reached a certain point of ease. And just like most of us, writing still doesn’t come easy, they still need discipline and persistence. But what I have noticed also about these writers is that sometimes when they delayed their writing ambitions, that by the time they settled into the writing life, that not only had the fire of their youth waned, but also sometimes passion for things big and small had waned too.