UCLA Extension Writers’ Program is one of my favorite places to teach. It’s run by talented, dedicated professionals who are writers themselves and therefore understand what it takes to put together a successful writing class, as well as how to provide students with the tools to help them thrive as writers.
The program’s newest way of reaching out to students is its inventive Writing Tip video series. Read more →
Early on, I learned that game faces were not my forte. Read more →
In the past few months, I’ve made some great additions to my Writers’ Resources page, where I curate posts about craft, submission, and blogging advice. It’s time to highlight a few of them. Read more →
Lately, blogging has become my obsession. I jot ideas while I’m walking the dog, stopped at a stoplight, in the middle of meetings. I pore over pictures on Flickr to find images that embody the tone or emotion I’m trying to capture. I get excited about writing posts. I write them quickly, with abandon, which I don’t always do with my fiction.
Still, I find myself wondering whether blogging is worth the effort. My writer crush, Chuck Wendig, whose potty mouth matches my own, recently offered this sage advice about blogging: Read more →
My mother wrote letters whenever she was angry. Pages and pages typed on her electric typewriter, filled with reworked accusations framed by Whiteout and multiple X’s savaged into the paper. Clearly written in a flurry of rage. It was enough to make anyone hate letters.
At least, it was enough to make me hate them. Read more →
When I was a lawyer, work weekends were my worst nightmare. They meant several all-nighters in a row, lousy food, sleeping on my office sofa, begging the partner on Monday morning for a half hour to go home and shower, only to have him say, “When you’re done, you go home.”
These days, the possibility of a work weekend fills me with glee–and fear. Read more →
My mother died two years ago today.
Her death was sudden yet unsurprising. She was only seventy, but her body and spirit were so very weary. Weary of weight and pain and medicine and needles and sugar counts. And of the countless limitations that ruled her: limitations on what she could eat, how far she could walk, how long she could sit in a car, on an airplane, in a chair, in a bed.
By the end, there was no comfortable place for her. Her obesity made even stillness excruciating. Read more →
I hate change. Hate it.
Part of the problem is that I’m wildly indecisive and a devout pessimist. I take Murphy’s Law seriously: What can go wrong, must go wrong.
So, while some people see change as an opportunity for growth and good fortune, I see it as potential disaster waiting to ambush me. Read more →
I was in third grade when I uttered my first curse word.
I told myself I did it by accident, but really it was in the name of love. Read more →
When my grandmother died, I hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade. My mother was her least-favorite child, which made me and my twin sister her least favorite grandchildren. (My younger brother she could forgive for being my mother’s child since he’s a boy.)
She died recently, less than a year after my mother. We joked that she couldn’t even give my mom a full year’s peace in whatever afterlife there might be. Read more →
Recently, Anna Murray, a good friend and kick-ass writer, wrote a series of posts about women changing their names when they marry. As part of the project, she asked friends to share their reasons for their choices. Anna’s posts are provocative and well-researched. I particularly love the one where she debunks the myth that women have always taken their husbands’ names. I highly recommend reading the whole series in one sitting.
The project got me thinking about my own choice to keep my surname.
I never considered changing my last name, especially since I married later in life, in my mid-thirties. By then, I was known in all my social and professional circles as “Colette Sartor.” Any name recognition value I’d built through the years would have gone out the window if I changed my name. And, from what I’ve heard, legally changing names is an administrative nightmare.
But really, the choice to keep my surname was more personal than that. Read more →
I am not the easiest personality. I’m emotional and opinionated. I obsess. I’m the ultimate pessimist. I’m a self-professed, consummate grudge holder.
But I’m not someone who’s quick to anger–at least, not with anyone outside my family.
Still, certain topics get a rise out of me. Certain words are fighting words, even when I don’t want them to be. Read more →
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