Posted in Books, Living In Community on May 1st, 2012 No Comments »
The Sorting is a very important ceremony because, while you are here, your house will be something like your family within Hogwarts. You will have classes with the rest of your house, sleep in your house dormitory, and spend free time in your house common room. – Professor McGonagall, Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone [...]
Posted in Books, Momageddon, Rage Against The Pile on Apr 26th, 2012 3 Comments »
I’m starting to like my daughter again. I know it’s not very parental to dislike your own children, nor is it probably very Christian-like, but there’s the truth of it. Sometimes I don’t like my kid. … … Sorry for that pause. Had to deal with my daughter. What was I saying? Oh right. I [...]
Posted in Books on Jan 8th, 2012 3 Comments »
Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest… by Dan B Allender… Bossypants by Tina Fey Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer I thought I’d get organized about the books I want to read this year so I created a 2012 Reading [...]
Posted in Books, Comfort & Control, Seen, Heard, Said on Jun 3rd, 2011 1 Comment »
The Danger of Moralistic Parenting | The Resurgence. I loved everything about this post, then realized at the very end that it’s an excerpt from a book I just ordered on the Kindle. WIN! An excerpt from the post: Certainly the faith that has empowered the persecuted church for two millennia isn’t as thin and [...]
Posted in Books, Everyday on Jun 26th, 2010 No Comments »
With everything going on lately, I’m reminded of a book I read a few years ago by Chris Rock’s mom. I don’t think I appreciated it is as much when I first read it, as my kids weren’t in school yet and we lived a pretty isolated, preschool-mom life. Now that my kids are in [...]
Posted in Books, Getting Things Done, Startup Mom on Apr 1st, 2010 No Comments »
Occasionally I work long hours after the kids go to bed, and Monday was one of those nights. I was a little manic, and despite being tired I couldn’t shut my brain off. As I tried to tear myself away from the laptop and just Leave It All Undone, I remembered how I gazed longingly [...]
Posted in Books, On Writing on Sep 25th, 2009 2 Comments »
I don’t feel like writing. When it comes to my creative process I tend to cycle through a create/consume pattern, and I definitely prefer to consume these days. I just finished Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere – which I highly recommend – and picked up Confessions of a Shopoholic at the library today. What are you reading [...]
Posted in Books, On Writing on Jul 13th, 2009 1 Comment »
As I think about a book I will one day write, I consider what form I want it to take, what shape. How specific do I want the theme to be? Is there an event or experience I can use as the backdrop for a story? For instance, I wrote several essays about various home [...]
Posted in Books on Mar 16th, 2009 No Comments »
Carole is from a working class family outside of Manhattan. Through hard work and tenacity she worked her way up the ladder at ABC from the age of nineteen when she was hired to duplicate video tapes or something like that. She eventually got into producing, and many of her documentaries won awards. It was [...]
Posted in Books, On Writing on Feb 24th, 2009 5 Comments »
Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog Find new books and literate friends with Shelfari, the online book club. These are some memoirs (and a couple fiction selections) I’ve read in the last few years – if you hover over the book my review or thoughts will pop up (if I’ve written any). I like [...]
Posted in Books, Comfort & Control on Feb 18th, 2009 No Comments »
Last month I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. I’d heard great things about her and about the book, and was intrigued by its plot summary. It proved to measure up to all I’d heard about it. There were a few exceptions to the praise, however. I found some who saw no value in it, [...]
Posted in Books, On Writing on Sep 25th, 2008 1 Comment »
Tonight we were at Third Place Books attending the release party for our friend, Jeffrey Overstreet’s second fantasy fiction novel, Cyndere’s Midnight. Before he read an excerpt, he talked of beasts, and the appetite that drives them, and the things that transform them. “When we don’t understand the monster in ourselves,” he said, “we don’t [...]
Posted in Books, On Writing on Sep 8th, 2008 1 Comment »
I met Jennette Fulda, author of Half-Assed, at the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. I attended a session titled Blog to Book, and she was one of the panelists, having converted her weight loss blog, Half of Me, into this memoir. She was lovely, and I was happy to buy a copy of her book, [...]
Posted in Books on Aug 20th, 2008 No Comments »
I took a break from fiction last month and read Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. To explain my interest in this book, I should mention that Bryan once read me an entire keynote speech given by Clay Shirky, from his iPhone, while sitting on a bench as the kids played at the park. Such [...]
Posted in Books on Jun 25th, 2008 6 Comments »
I finished two fiction books this month, which seems like a grand accomplishment considering all that divides my time. Atonement, by Ian McEwan, was chosen by a friend for our book club. It has three distinct sections, plus an epilogue, and most reviewers on Amazon had pretty strong feelings about which section they preferred. Even [...]
Be warned: what you see here is not my best work. It is what Anne Lamott describes in Bird By Bird as a series of “shitty first drafts.” Blogging dragged me kicking and screaming out of creative constipation by getting me to actually write. So I do that. A lot. Without worrying about every word choice or comma placement.
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"Sanity Hacks of a 