I went to a birthday party this weekend where the adult being so honored didn’t want to come into the house and greet the waiting party. And he knew this get-together was going to happen. So he stood around in the driveway, then on the porch, for quite a while. The buffet spread was out–and […] Read More

Just when I get blogging down and have ever-so-confusedly waded into Facebook, here comes the rolling thunder of Twitter. It has been around. But never so publicly and famously as in recent weeks, or so it seems to me. Months ago I made some move to sign up for it, but have done nothing with […] Read More

Dealing with feelings of shame can be divided into steps that help mightily to defuse the whole miserable state of mind. This thinking comes from a book noted in an earlier post here: Brene Brown‘s I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power. It’s quite a […] Read More

Bold isn’t just for the boardroom. One can also take this admirable quality home to bed. Here’s an encouraging item that showed on up on my Compuserve screen yesterday: “Six Habits of Highly Sexual Women.” It includes such wisdom as: “Carnal Custom #2: Let Loose … Sex is not rocket science. It won’t cure cancer […] Read More

It’s once again time for a bit of boldly shameless self-promotion. Here’s my flyer for one Saturday afternoon class and three separate Friday lunchtime sessions. If the Raleigh-Chapel Hill area is in reach for you, I hope you’ll consider coming to one or more: I’m offering a new half-day workshop for anyone interested in writing. […] Read More

If you’ve ever felt you wasted time by writing ten pages — or a whole lot more — that didn’t work, take a look at the extravagant generosity of this Zen-type artist and you may feel better. Scott Wade reproduces Old Masters and does his own original work IN DUST on the windows of cars. […] Read More

Don’t miss the dazzling photos of the Menton Lemon Festival on the blog called Imagine from floral designer Kenju. It sounds garish, but it’s not: a house-sized Taj Mahal made of lemons and oranges, a castle, a towering lemon girl, and more. I’d never heard of Menton or its lemon festival. And now I must […] Read More

“Painting into Light” is an art exhibition at Guilford College in Greensboro, a one-man show by my friend George Wingate. Thursday night Bob and I went to the campus to hear the artist talk about his work. George was his intriguingly digressive, imaginative, thoughtful self, before a packed SRO house. I didn’t take notes and […] Read More

A bit of frivolity that I’ve recently found to help my writing: stopping now and then to glance at one of my favorite gossip blogs. Lately while working on revisions on my novel, I’ve found myself fairly frequently taking five-minute breaks to look at Jossip or Gawker, two of my vices. On the face of […] Read More

What’s the best bold action I could take today? That’s the question I just now asked myself. First, not getting into a dither about what constitutes best. Then what? Here’s what it comes to: working on my novel, as I did yesterday and the day before…. Each day briefly unnerving to begin. Sometimes that sensation […] Read More