My favorite shirt is torn. The minute the dryer buzzed, I stopped what I was doing and went to retrieve my shirt, so it wouldn’t wrinkle. I pulled it out, shook it, hung it, and saw the pinprick sized hole at the edge of the pocket. Perhaps it was a spot? No, a hole going […]

The Pinocchio Process by Warren Moore I’ve been writing since before I knew how to write – no, really. There are reel-to-reel tapes of a three-year-old me reciting songs and stories. My dad asks, “Did you make that up?” I say I did, and he says, “Pretty weird, kid.” It really hasn’t changed too much […]

Plotter or Pantser? What’s Your Style? I Think I’m a Binge Writer by Heather Weidner Thank you so much for letting me stop by for a visit on your blog. I love to talk about books and writing. Writers usually fall into one of two camps, plotters (those who plan, plot, and outline before writing), and […]

The End Of Our Thanksgiving by Debra H. Goldstein Thanksgiving week at the Goldstein’s house is coming to an end. The last child will be flying out tonight. The first one arrived last Tuesday. In between, a total of twelve people and one grand-dog descended on us. As parents, we will miss them and look […]

Sometimes a Bad Day Turns Into a Good Day, Especially If There’s Gin by Margaret Fenton 2007 was a great year. I went to Killer Nashville in August. I paid a lot of extra dollars and was given the opportunity to pitch my unpublished manuscript to either an agent or a representative from Oceanview Publishing. […]

Juxtaposing “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Where Did the Summer Go?” You know how a song gets caught in your head? Two phrases are ringing in my ears, but I don’t know how or why my brain thinks they go together. Logically, they don’t. There just isn’t an intellectual way to reconcile “Days of […]

When I moved to the Berkshires many years ago, I was an aspiring writer. So, I naturally sought out other authors who had lived and written there. The author with whom I felt the most kinship and who turned out to be an important influence on a novel I would eventually write was Edith Wharton. […]

Usually, I write my blogs in advance and have them prescheduled to pop up at six in the morning. With Yom Kippur, the most important Jewish holiday, during which we atone for our sins and on which our fate for the next year is sealed, being this past weekend and a number of other things […]

Touched by the Bard – Shakespeare’s Influence on the Haydn Mysteries by Nupur Tustin It was from the Cambridge Companion to Haydn that I learned that the great composer’s library contained the complete volume of Shakespeare’s plays—in the original English at that. Shakespeare’s plays were quite popular in the German-speaking world. They were enacted in […]

Writing to a Theme by Carol L. Wright Remember back in school when the teacher would give you an assignment to write on a particular theme? Something along the lines of “What I Did on my Summer Vacation” or “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up”? Well, for those of us who grow […]