Welcome!!!

SO.

Here we are, on my new blog.

Thanks for joining me!

For clarity (yours and mine), I’ve decided to schedule topics for certain days:

[Semi] Madness to my Method Mondays– Sharing writing tips in a reader-friendly way.

Tightrope Tuesdays - Walking through parenthood without a net.

Hokey Pokey Wednesdays – That’s what it’s all about: stories about my strange life, and humanity.

Quote Contest Thursdays – For my giveaway, I’ll give a topic and whoever submits the best quote on the subject wins.

Guest Blog Fridays – I get the day off! Ka-chow!

Revolutionary Saturdays – Tidbits about the American Revolution, from a human perspective.

For my first Method Monday, I’d like to address all those people I meet who say they’ve “always wanted to write.”

My answer to them: “Didn’t you have a pencil?”

If you want to write, write! Don’t worry about technique, style, that dreaded “voice” – we’ll get to that later. PLEASE don’t worry about genre or who your audience will be. Write for yourself. Write something true. Write something real.

Scared?

I was, too. Any writer who says they’ve never been scared is either lying or totally zoned on Xanax. Come on – writing is terrifying.

Do it anyway.

For inspiration, I’ll share how I wound up writing my novels SAVED BY THE MUSIC & THE GIRL NEXT DOOR:


I was in The New School’s MFA Creative Writing Program. You need to write a thesis for your master’s degree, and in this case it was supposed to be at least 70 pages of a novel (could be short stories also.) Though I’d always known I was a writer, I never thought I could write a novel. I was completely intimidated, and thought you needed some sort of permission from the gods. But I had a story I wanted to tell. It was tough because it was autobiographical. Writing something about yourself is like opening up a vein and bleeding onto the page. So there I was stalling...thinking about things like what the weather would be like in the book (summer = hot. ’Nuff said.) Anything to avoid writing it.

Concurrently¸ I needed to write a paper comparing two works of literature. I chose THE CATCHER IN THE RYE as one, because it was my favorite book as a teen. Reading it as an adult, it occurred to me that all Holden’s problems stemmed from grief. His brother died. Instead of pulling the family together and dealing with it, Holden’s parents shipped him off to boarding schools, where he’d flunk out each time.

Holden’s descriptions of his brother Allie were so poignant. I wanted to see their relationship – some sort of prequel.

Then, one day, the TV was on in my sons’ room. You know, one of those times when no one is actually watching, and yet...it’s on. It was MTV. Now I know it was the first season of THE REAL WORLD. At the time, I had no idea what I was watching. I saw a boy who had AIDS getting a blood transfusion, with the tube in his arm – and a girl was holding his other hand. I thought, “Oh my god. It must be so sad to not know if your boyfriend is going to live or die.”

I went to sleep with Holden and Allie and this boy and girl in my head. When I woke up I said, out-loud: “Jesse’s dying.”

Then I said, also out-loud, “Who the hell is Jesse?”

I was writing – or trying to write – about Willow and Axel, the characters in SAVED.

I’d dreamt THE GIRL NEXT DOOR in its entirety – and I was annoyed! “How am I supposed to write two books when I can’t even write one?” I grumbled.

Talk about being ungrateful!

But soon enough, I realized it was an incredible gift from my subconscious. I was struggling so much with SAVED. My inner mind said, “Hey, crazy girl. Just sit down and write. One scene at a time. Here, I gave you another story to show you how it’s done.”

So I sat down, and I wrote.

I wrote the two novels in three months.

The end.

(How I dealt with motherhood while writing two novels in three months is another story...
Maybe tomorrow’s...
Tune in and find out!)