Category: literature

  • Anniversaries on the edge

    My husband and I have an unusual tradition for celebrating our anniversary. We didn’t intend for this to be a metaphor, but it’s a little too on the nose.  We drive, surf, boat, cycle, hike in snow, rappel, or do some activity in which we’re moving forward, together. Sometimes we live a little on the…

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  • How NOT to do an Artist’s Date

    The Artist Date need not be overtly “artistic”– think mischief more than mastery. Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play. Since art is about the play of ideas, they feed our creative work by replenishing our inner well of images and inspiration. Julia Cameron – The Artist’s Way blog –…

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  • The Cracked Rib Christmas

    2023 is the year I leveled up for ten months.Then I leveled way down. I wrote three books and a novella. With my siblings, I cleaned out and sold my dad’s house, in a very long sale process involving a squatter. After my dad’s passing, I paid his bills and taxes and closed out his…

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  • The Laughing Loaf Bacon Bread recipe

    Bacon bread is by far the most popular bread item from the original Laughing Loaf Bakery I operated. It’s made from a biga, a pre-ferment. Because biga is my go-to bread method, I named the pesky little dog in my cozy mystery series after it. The pre-ferment is much better behaved than the dog. 😄…

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  • Crazy love

    My dad, who passed away last fall, was often a difficult person to deal with. But I never doubted that he loved me. Fiercely. One thing I learned pretty early on: when another person expresses love for you, you’re receiving that love through a filter they’ve pieced together from their life experiences.

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  • A house named hope

    Four years ago today, on April 22, 2019, I sat in a Korean restaurant having a good, very spicy lunch with my friend Ann. I received a call on my cell phone that felt surreal, though I knew it had been coming for a long time.

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  • New year—new news!

    New years is not my favorite holiday. To me it seems arbitrary to have a big raging party for the beginning of a new year. Seriously, what really changes on January 1? And as we’re still stuck in pandemic times—which I hereby designate PT—even less has changed. We faced more of a retreat into our…

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  • Writing myself out of a corner

      It happened with my first book, and it’s happening with the second. I plunge into writing my book gleefully, without an outline. I love creating an interesting cast of characters and putting them into painful, impossible situations to see what they do. And what they think. I am a discovery writer to a certain…

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  • The music that will never, ever go away

    Home Short Fiction Blog X This year, with political firestorms and the tragic, actual firestorms throughout my state, I’m craving the comfort of Christmas songs. I want to hear the familiar carols, the goofy songs (“I’m Mr. Heat Miser”) and the smooth retro feel of classics from the 1950s and ’60s, that golden age of…

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  • The Indoor Life

    Home Short Fiction Blog X Nine days after the start of the most destructive fire in California history, the Bay Area is filled with smoke. When you walk out of your house, you smell it. There’s ash on your car in the morning. The parks, normally filled with kids, are eerily empty. Our air quality…

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  • Back from the UK (with pictures)

    Home Short Fiction Blog X The jet lag has worn off, but two weeks ago I got back from a wonderful trip to England. I walked through London in the footsteps of my favorite writers. I ate lunch at the pub in Oxford where Tolkein and C.S. Lewis met on Tuesdays. I got to see…

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  • The impossibility of writing in an empty house

    Home Short Fiction Blog X The door closes. There is that beautiful sound: silence. The sound I’ve longed to hear, through years of being a mom to three children. No video game boss battles. Nobody banging away at musical instruments (which I admit I enjoy). No requests for food or money. I am…alone. I’ve made…

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  • Who’s up for a bored game?

    Home Short Fiction Blog X I grew up in a family of poor sports. The kind of people who stomped off to their bedrooms when they started losing a game. I remember Monopoly games so intense that objects were thrown. Issues came up that had nothing to do with the placement of little green houses…

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  • The top 5 writing distractions. (#5 will surprise you)

    Home Short Fiction Blog X If anything is a test of your will as a writer, it’s resisting the distractions that curl up a ghostly cartoon finger and lure you away from the page. They’re evil, I tell you. Evil. And the rationalizing that goes on in a writer’s head could fill volumes. Everyone has…

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  • Hot date at Safeway

    Home Short Fiction Blog X My husband suggested that we go by ourselves to the grocery store. We needed some things for breakfast, and we had a house full of family–a wonderful thing, but noisy. “I like going to the grocery store with you,” he said. “It can be like a date.” So at 10…

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  • The fight to stay focused when my husband talks tech

    Home Short Fiction Blog X My husband is a software engineer, and he loves his work. He writes and troubleshoots code for a graphics card company every day. Then he comes home and writes more code. Because it’s so much fun. But when my husband wants to share with me the thing he’s devoted most…

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  • How not to dread writing

    Home Short Fiction Blog X I am a writer and a writing teacher. So I deal with my own writing motivation issues, then I turn around and help high schoolers with theirs. My personal catchphrase and what will inevitably be engraved on my tombstone is: No one should have to dread writing. But I do,…

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  • What the fork

    Home Short Fiction Blog X My husband has this thing with forks. He picks up the fork he’s been given and examines it carefully, turning it on its side. He inspects the alignment of the tines. If one is bent, he sighs. He calmly gets up from where he is seated and goes to the…

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