1. 01. Girly Girl

   

   I’ve never been much of a girly girl.

   I rarely wear makeup or get my nails done. Most days I forget to brush my hair. Waxing any body part seems like a torture designed for others braver than I am.

   Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate girly things. Like clothes, for instance. I love clothes. Love. Them. Especially when I was a lawyer and had extra cash. Guess where it all went? Not to vacations or nice cars or nice houses.

   I spent my extra cash on clothes. And shoes.

   God, the shoes. Read more →

2. 02. Your Own Doppelganger

   

   I’m an identical twin, so you’d think it would be easy for me to tell other twins apart.

   It’s not.

   In fact, sometimes I can’t even tell me and my sister apart. Read more →

4. 03. There Are No Accidents

   

   I’m not a big believer in fate or destiny. Sometimes shit just happens.

   And yet. Read more →

5. 04. The Anti-Resolution List

   

   I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.

   I don’t even pretend to have the best of intentions about making them. I don’t try to get around to it. I don’t go all Scarlett O’Hara and think, “Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow, I’ll figure out the perfect resolutions to help me get what I want…I mean, to help make me a better person.” Read more →

7. 05. Come Hide Under My Umbrella

   

   It’s been raining in Los Angeles. Finally. Read more →

8. 06. The Grinch or the Three Faces of Eve?

   

   It’s the holiday season, that time of year when the world falls in love…

   My ass it is. Read more →

10. 07. Scream Therapy

    

    I used to sing. It wasn’t what I was best at, but it was what I loved most. Even as a kid I knew I didn’t have the strongest instrument. My voice was small, light, airy. Nothing like Barbra Streisand’s powerhouse vocals on the vinyl records that I played over and over on my olive green portable record player. Her voice was big and bold, muscular in a way that I envied.

    Read more →

11. 08. Make a List and Check It Twice

    

    In this season of giving and gratefulness, I have a confession to make: I am a big old pessimist. Any glass I see isn’t just half empty, it’s parched dryer than the Sahara and has a crack bigger than the San Andreas fault. Read more →

13. 09. A Change of Place

    

    Finding the time–and the place–to write can be a bitch. Read more →

14. 10. Somewhere to Play

    

    When I first started writing fiction, my characters often walked around a blank landscape. Imagine two cartoon characters, say Calvin and Hobbes (my favorites), centered on a white page with nothing to play with, nothing to break or throw or kick or transform. Nothing to do but talk to each other. That’s where my characters used to live, in that boring, blank universe. And guess what? Nothing much happened. Read more →

16. 11. Let’s Try That Again

    

    Sometimes it’s difficult to decide whose story to tell. You’ve got your conflict – a guy (let’s say he’s a photographer) leans over the guard rail of a bridge and may or may not be about to jump while a woman driving by thinks he needs saving and decides she’s the one to do it.

    Now you’ve got some choices to make about who gets to tell the story and how that character is going to tell it. Read more →

17. 12. Bitch Slap Your Inner Control Freak

    

    Ms. CF (a/k/a the control freak who rules my life) has been in my head a lot lately, making it hard to write. She and the rational side of my brain (let’s call him Mr. R) are besties. They love to commiserate about how to get me away from this writing…thing…and into something more practical and monetarily satisfying. Something safe. Something controllable. Read more →

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