The cover for my new novel Cobalt Blue, coming out in spring, arrived today.  I am thrilled.  I love the blue.  Love the simplicity of it.  Love the boldness.  (It's a fairly bold story, too, BTW.) Read More

In a few minutes, I'm going out to rip the peeling bumper sticker off my battered Ford fender.  It's time.  The contest is over.  What's important now is to unpolarize, compromise, re-integrate, harmonize, and chill. Not that it's so easy.  It continues to amaze me that the Clintons can argue so passionately for their former […] Read More

It takes serious courage to run for public office — no matter how much money and support a person may have. The process can fairly be compared to opening in front of a live audience  your college application letters or the email responses from agents and editors to your manuscript.  Or to sitting in front a world-wide audience of […] Read More

  Here's a wonderfully thoughtful useful book that can actually guide readers in figuring themselves out.  It's by the psychologist/analyst  Dr. Joseph Burgo who writes the wildly popular blog After Psychotherapy. Why Do I Do That?  (and can't you just hear yourself saying it?) offers ways to recognize our knee-jerk responses and the feelings they're […] Read More

Friday my clinical psychologist husband Bob Dick will teach a one-day seminar on using hypnosis to improve your relationships.  This is his last seminar of the year — 9-5 at our pondside log house in the woods, near Chapel Hill, NC. "Individuals and couples will use hypnosis and learn self-hypnosis while exploring a practical approach to […] Read More

  Write when you're angry. Cook up ideas in a room with blue walls.  These and other strategies from Imagine: How Creativity Works are simple and usable.  And did you know that just before your new idea or connection becomes conscious, the crackle of recognition can actually be observed in the brain by a technique using fMRI and EEG?  Cool! […] Read More

I was suffering a touch of hostess anxiety one day recently while trying to civilize our house for the arrival of guests. A business acquaintance I saw that day interrupted our conversation to take a phone call.  "Sorry," she said, when she hung up.  "I had to take that…." Turned out that her 17 year-old son had gone […] Read More

  Late last night, after hours at home, my husband Bob pushed aside the edge of a curtain to turn off an outdoor light and found the view blocked by a close-up of branches and leaves.  All he said to me, flopped on the sofa a few feet away, was, "Come over here."  But there was […] Read More

A lengthy series of personal pieces on anxiety is running on The New York Times online-only Opinionator.  The most recent "America the Anxious" is quite funny, others more serious.  I felt a kinship with this writer, Diana Spechler: "For more than four years — ever since graduation had dumped me into adulthood — I’d been […] Read More

The New Yorker first alerted me to this wondrous book, The Tools.  It's by a pair of psychotherapists, both of whom wanted to be able to give clients  immediately usable, effective tactics for dealing better with life.  It's based on using your sticky situations as a cue/springboard to big leaps forward. The subtitle is: Transform Your […] Read More