Today’s little spark of inspiration comes from a milk carton. This morning as I took the chocolate Silk soymilk out of the fridge, I noted the advice on the side: “Take A Sip Forward,” a sentence that, by the way, is trademarked. The idea is that drinking soy milk is “one small step toward living […] Read More

Allow me to crow. After two and three quarters hours of fiddling, husband Bob and I have succeeded in getting wireless to work at our house on my laptop. We’ve never even been able to use a cellphone here. We’re in the woods and apparently hard for signal to find. This miraculous computing capability was […] Read More

When I was a kid, my mother used to drop pieces of advice on me as they happened to occur to her. One day, she said, somewhat out-of-the-blue: Never buy a business; you’ll come out much better if you start your own. I did do exactly that, when I was twenty-two and started freelancing full-time. […] Read More

Seems to me that though there’s a lot of scrambling going on in these difficult economic days, in some sense the country is on hold. Lots of decisions, actions, expenditures have been delayed. (Yesterday a writer told me about her novel, which was close to sold in October. A well-known editor at a major house […] Read More

My friend Sabine was helping a mutual friend overhaul the inside of her house. They’d been hard at it all morning and then met me for lunch (I, who had merely been sitting at a computer.) Their dust-stirring industry was inspiring to hear about. Sabine had learned a lot of her techniques, she said, from […] Read More

My one meeting, some years ago, with my hero John Updike involved a very small bit of boldness, which turned out well in its modest way. It took place not long after my first novel Revelation had come out. I wrote about the incident at the time for a Research Triangle newspaper. I’m “the local […] Read More

Recently, in discussing the writer’s self-doubt in the comments with writer Greta, I speculated that even my hero the recently passed John Updike probably had such moments. In one of the tributes to Updike in The New Yorker since, I found proof of this. In a letter to novelist E.L. Doctorow, Updike wrote that as […] Read More

I’ve just come from my friend Laurel‘s 70th birthday brunch, held by the members of her Thursday afternoon writer’s class/group, which I have been a member of for 26 years. In advance of the day, we put together a small album in which we each had six pages to use as we wish to express […] Read More

Response to my Wednesday’s post about dealing with a Blue Cross coverage malfunction leads me to impassionedly say more. The ideas a couple of people expressed — which I welcome! — include the view that others are worse off, I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, and that I think about what Gandhi would do . […] Read More

So after my first efforts failed, I (boldly) talked with a Blue Cross rep by phone who kindly told me the name of a drugstore where I could get a vaccination that would be covered. The next day I went to the drugstore. They give the anti-shingles shots, but said my insurance wouldn’t cover it. […] Read More