“I learned this lesson too late, frankly: Do not judge it while you’re doing it. Do not go back and fix things that are 20 pages ago when you’re already 20 pages past that. You’ll… Read More
I have written plenty of obituaries over my time, and by that I mean news stories about public figures whose lives were remarkable. I also wrote or edited many articles involving death. There’s a language… Read More
“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the… Read More
“I did scary things like that when I was a young woman. I had all of my 20s to fail. I wanted to be a stand-up and then I wanted to be Lily Tomlin. I… Read More
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”— Jack London The stroke of genius, the bolt of blue, the eureka moment: so much of our culture has various threads… Read More
“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.”— Will Self A quote like this… Read More
Two weeks ago, I launched this website, and with it a revived form of Dot Dot Dot, a blog I first started, um, 22 years ago. (Two weeks, 22 years; time is a construct, right?)… Read More
“Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded as the heavy petting of literature.”— Fran Lebowitz The quote of today comes from Fran Lebowitz’s debut book Metropolitan Life, which established her in… Read More
Last year, as I was nursing some ideas about having a digital sandbox of my own, I got in touch with Matthew Hollett. I had not yet met Matthew, but we had some mutual contacts,… Read More
“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.”— Robertson Davies A note: the cat above was Bellybutton, the much beloved cat Martha and I… Read More