Was it really about a publishing goal?
I recently saw a question posted on a social media author group page, of which I am a member, asking if any writer has earned out the amount she has put into the (hybrid) publication of her book. I read the fifty plus affirmed comments and their details. Sure, every author hopes to cash in on an investment that has been years in the making, a reward for hours of isolation, fingers tapping letters into a symphony of words. Any earnings are well-deserved and admirable. I wondered if earning out [...]
same-named? setting yourself apart from or connecting to
Before my memoir was published, I did a lot of searching. Not to be confused with a figurative searching of the soul, for connections, for my place in life, but a literal internet search. My due diligence was to see if there were books like mine with similar titles, stories, or themes. I would publish my work in a competitive field, and I wanted to give my book its best chance at being different, setting itself apart from the others. Part of my due diligence was to consider what name [...]
A writer’s path to discovery – a lot of questions
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Before my mother’s passing and when she would ask me questions, of which I don’t remember specifically what they were—something about how we live our lives, why bad things are happening in the world—I tried to answer in simple terms as I am not one for offering deep philosophical explanations. “You have an answer for everything,” she then told me with a swipe of her hand. I smiled demurely at this, that maybe she saw me as a grown up smart one. But then I [...]
from dark to light-a remembrance day
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is today. This is an essay I wrote a few years ago and have amended with fresh memories and impressions of a day I spent in remembrance. Sometimes, I like to see my world as being black or white, segregated into neat piles. My tidy thinking and tendency to categorize allows me to understand, to make sense of things. But segregation is unrealistic because there is gray. There is the gray of neutrality, of not being on either end of any spectrum. And there is the [...]
in the things we keep
The other day I opened a plastic bin filled with my mother’s personal things. When emptying her apartment months ago, I had stuffed into them files and papers and notebooks and photographs and more notepapers from drawers in her desk and nightstand and metal files. I then covered the bins with their tight lids as if to preserve her life, in a state just as I had known her. But it wasn’t until I had released the lid of one particular bin, did I learn of her what I hadn't [...]
A memory tree
winter willow I sat on the floor and pulled the lid from a squat octagonal storage bin, releasing a crisp waft of evergreen. Inside, a trove of trinkets lay in beds of crinkled butcher paper. They varied in size, shape, color—and age. I rummaged through the collection, my fingers becoming sticky from leftover tree sap clinging to the Christmas tree ornaments hanging from their tight tree quarters of Christmases past. I singled out a few, one at a time picking them up by their hooks, then dangled them amid the [...]
A writer’s brand and a little logline
I sat down today with an intention to write a logline for my new book, The Wisdom of the Willow, currently temporarily parked in a copy edit. Anxiety bled through thoughts and limbs, and I stalled at jumping into it. What do I say? How do I narrow my book’s synopsis to just a couple of sentences? Einstein’s words struck. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” This terrified me. How could I have written an entire story and not understand it well enough to [...]
a deer in the sunlight
The sun rose just enough above the horizon that morning to obscure my vision. My morning walk through a path in the woods was brisk in pace and in weather as I carried a load of thoughts from the weeks of stuffing bags with my mother’s clothes to be given to the church, a plastic bin with photographs of her from a toddler to a bride, a crucifix with a single palm threaded through it, and small notebooks with her journal-like entries. My thoughts were heavy with the memories of [...]