Every morning, after ramping up with a mug of weak tea, I have one giant cup of incredibly strong coffee. Almost immediately, I am filled with focused energy, high spirits, and love for my fellow man. Which, even though it’s happened every single day for the past 30 years (give or take the occasional streak [...]
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Once upon a time in a dingy Hollywood studio far, far away, I took my very first acting class.1 I was there because it had been suggested to me by my improv teacher that while my writing was passable, my ability to convey actual human emotion onstage was somewhere between “painful to behold” and “chair”, [...]
Never let perfectionism get in the way of getting started. Never let sucking get in the way of shipping.
On writing, soulmates and why prayers aren’t the answer to either.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but when I was a girl, I had a brilliant notion: what if I could have all of the sicknesses of my lifetime at once, rather than having them parceled out here and there, when they were least expected and seldom welcome? Or, because I quickly figured out [...]
For a long time, I’ve been aware of the most obvious form of addiction in my family: alcoholism. First of all, because Mom drank. A lot. And so did Mom’s dad and some of Mom’s brothers. A lot. Once it spirals out of the societally-determined safe zone, alcohol addiction gets obvious fast, what with all the [...]
This piece builds on this one, which you may or may not want to read as well. Once upon a time, when I was very much like I am today, only with a lot more income and a lot less happiness, I found myself shopping in a store that sold nothing but sexy ladies’ underwear. [...]
Warning: while this essay is really about writing, it contains highly descriptive talk, and quite a bit of it, about poop. If you’re very sensitive to poop-talk, you may want to skip it. Plenty of other stuff for you to read on the interwebs! Back when I was first diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and trying [...]
A good friend of mine has some issues with language. She is, by her own admission, a lousy speller. While her vocabulary houses more than a few five-dollar words, they’re as likely as not to turn up as malapropisms when hauled out. Her sentence construction can be choppy, her grammatical structure inelegant and her punctuation, [...]
Yesterday morning, I finished reading Unbroken, the true-life story of Louis Zampirini’s triumphant, plague-filled journey from punk kid to Olympic runner to WWII Air Force bombadier to POW to haunted veteran to redeemed hero. It’s an amazing story. As I tore through it on my Kindle, the only way for the spindly-limbed gal to fly when [...]
