a small inheritance

The room that I stayed in when I visited my grandparents’ house contained little to entertain young children. It was not a large room, but it was big enough to house a creaky old queen-sized bed, an antique vanity table, a sewing machine — the kind that folded into a wooden housing — and a [...]

>:(

So I was reading the New York Times while eating my lunch. Or rather, I was wondering what happened to the New York Times, while eating my lunch.
The reasons? First, I read an article about letters Hillary Clinton wrote to a high school friend while she was in college. It’s a three-page long, seemingly desperate [...]

The things we carry

I was browsing Flickr last night, and I came across this group, in which people lay out the items they carry on a day to day basis and photograph them.
There’s something strangely intriguing about these pictures. I kept hitting next, next, next to see more. At first, I thought, we’re all the same, we carry [...]

They’re just as annoying as memos.

Literary magazine staff and manuscript readers must have just come back from their summer vacations, all refreshed and sharp — everyone seems to be writing about rejections.
Sigh.
I got one yesterday too. And it’s not the first. It’s strange: Every day when I reach my mailbox I have a surge of hope. I flip through the [...]

simplifying

I’ve been making some changes. I’ve been trying to simplify everything in my life — maybe it was my technology overload, or the fact that I’ve been sideswiped by the 9 to 5. I find myself wanting to bring everything down to bare bones. What do I really need? Why am I doing this, or [...]

see-saw, see-saw

I know it’s time to write when I begin thinking about other kinds of art: painting, collage, photography… When I have not had the chance to write, like now, I begin imagining how I might make a collage, or, paint something, or design a new web page.
I had not made the connection until recently. I [...]

Like gulping down “Best American Short Stories” in 120 min.

…All the stories were good, but it was a lot to take in in a short period of time. I’m talking about Paris Je T’aime, which I saw last night.
The film is a montage of 18 shorts made by 22 different directors — from Joel and Ethan Coen to Gus Van Sant to Wes Craven. [...]

waking dreams

I worked myself into a frenzy this week. I have that tendency: work and stresses and stupid worries of various kinds just build and build and build, and then I sleep less and less and less.
And then I crash, from too much sleep lost, or from whatever was stressing me out being solved. I feel [...]

stumped.

In the short story that I’ve been writing (albeit slowly), I’m planning to have the main character read about a topic that she needs to understand quickly, and I want to include small snippets of text in the story, because the topic is one that readers might not know much about, and I want them [...]

Daily papers walking the plank

There’s an eye-opening column on Business Week’s web site that suggests that a major American city’s daily paper is due to close, from a business perspective, in the next 18-24 months. Guess which one’s at the top of the list?
Big hint: Top stories have recently included several (front-page) cheers on the awesomeness of “Ratatouille”, [...]