Every few months, I highlight some of the newest additions to my Writers’ Resources page, where I post links to articles and essays on everything from craft advice to submission and publishing advice to blogging tips.
This is the first time, however, that, as part of my roundup, I’m writing a eulogy of sorts for a resource that I adored.
In January, the amazing website, Beyond the Margins, closed its virtual doors. Read more →
The Age of Invisibility is upon me.
I’ve been dreading it.
I thought I had time. I thought it would be years before men started walking past me and letting doors slam in my face instead of holding them open for me. Before teenagers nearly mowed me down with their skateboards because they didn’t notice me directly in their paths.
But I live in Los Angeles. And I don’t do Botox or fillers.
Apparently, that’s enough in La La Land to launch an older woman into invisibility.
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 →
I like to think that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve evolved and learned to take unexpected events in stride. That I no longer adhere to the lesson ingrained in me since childhood about how every crisis, particularly an unexpected one, requires a huge fight.
But sometimes, despite my best intentions, my early crisis management training creeps up and overwhelms me.
Take, for instance, this past Super Bowl Sunday. There was no rising above adversity, no gracious laughter in the face of a screw up.
Instead, there were massive acts of bitchiness. On my part, of course.
As if there were any question about that. Read more →
I write early in the morning. I write late at night. I write in between critiquing papers and preparing lesson plans and helping my son with his homework and feeding the dog and making dinner and critiquing more papers and teaching workshops and attending writers groups and getting the car fixed and the driving my son to school and the dog to the vet and spending quiet time with my husband and kid and visiting relatives and going out to dinner with friends.
I write whenever I can. I write because I want to write. I write because I have to write. I write. I write. I write.
That’s what all writers do, isn’t it?
Yes, but with varying degrees of difficulty, depending on their financial situation. Read more →
I started out my dating life as a serial monogamist.
From my teens until well into my twenties, I held on tight to my relationships, especially the difficult ones. Nothing worth having should be easy to get. I would find the formula to make a difficult relationship work.
Guess what? No formula. No success. In my late twenties, I gave up on serial monogamy and started dating in earnest for the first time.
I had no idea what I was doing. Read more →
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 →
I spent my high school years at a tiny, all-girls Catholic school.
Before I go on, I need you to banish the image of a stereotypic Catholic school girl–sweet-faced, wearing knee-high socks and a pleated tartan miniskirt that barely covers her ass, her glasses lowered as she pouts with puffy, bee-stung lips.
Excise her from your mental database.
That was not our school. At our school, we were expected to exceed stereotypes, to assert ourselves, to be intellectually curious, volubly so.
I’m not a big believer in fate or destiny. Sometimes shit just happens.
And yet. Read more →
I’m always adding links to my Writers’ Resources page, so every now and then I like to highlight some of the new resources I’ve discovered, along with an old favorite or two. Read more →
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 →
I am a haphazard housekeeper, at best.
I didn’t used to be. Before I met my husband and had my son, my house was pristine, every surface a glorious, bare expanse: no pictures, no tchotchkes, no vases or plants. My bed was always made, my books always shelved, my paperwork and bills hidden away.
I even had rules about the way I kept my refrigerator: containers lined up by size, cheeses and meats in the deli drawer, fruits and veggies in the crisper, and only liquids on the top shelf since that’s the tallest shelf and liquid containers are the tallest items in the fridge.
No top-shelf solids. Not ever. Read more →
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