Yesterday I finished chapter 9 of this third draft of my novel. At 5,479 words, it is not quite the longest chapter in the book (as of yet): chapter 2 is a hefty 6,621 words. But still, it’s long. As of now, this draft is 34,266 words and, by my reckoning, about 1/3 finished. After […]
Read more“First sentences are doors to worlds.”—Ursula K. LeGuin Last night was Will’s first soccer game of the school year. It’s still more than a week before the first day of school, but soccer has been underway for a while now. Yesterday’s game felt familiar: the boys tore up the field and all of us parents […]
Read moreI have just now finished chapter five of this latest draft. The chapter is 2,864 words long, which brings the grand total of words in this draft to 20,227. They say that most novels are between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Does this mean that I am between 1/4 and 1/5 of the way done? If […]
Read moreForm A few weeks ago, I took my kids to the Alexander Calder exhibit at Duke’s Nasher Museum. This was the second of our “Mom-days,” a little summer practice I instituted last year when it became suddenly clear to me that, if I did not deliberately claim just a wee bit of my children’s time […]
Read moreI had forgotten completely this in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that […]
Read moreI am at the traffic light, and the sun is in my eyes. I haven’t owned a pair of sunglasses in over two weeks, because as I climbed out of the car at the airport, the glasses slipped from the top of my head and broke on the concrete. Thus began my journey to China: […]
Read moreI’ve loved January for a while now. It’s not that I don’t love December and all that those 31 days mean– I do. I love the Christmas tree and the decorations and the lights. And more than that, of course, I love Advent: the awareness of the waiting, the quietness of the birth, the miracle […]
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Once upon a time, I wanted to be Mary. The Santa thing never really took hold in me so much as Mary’s story did, and I would imagine myself to be her: thirteen or so, pregnant, sitting side-saddle on a saddle-less donkey, making my loping way toward Bethlehem. I was a dramatic child, drawn to […]
Read moreHis birthday was the day after Christmas, so we were all home from school. The day was a cold and grey one; I don’t remember if we had snow, but we had that feeling of the day after Christmas: that feeling of it’s being over, the feeling of anticlimax and of all the surprises behind […]
Read moreHeedless Perhaps we love the shore because the debris here could not be ours no matter how hard our lives. Or because the long shelf of land continues on under the water so even here at the edge of the world the edge is uncertain. Perhaps we love that the water rises to uncertain levels […]
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