A West Side Girl in the Big Wide World
Four years ago, when I decided to write a novel set in Buffalo, I did the worst thing I could possibly do. I looked up “what it takes to write a novel” on the Internet. I did not find loads of encouragement. Continue reading “So You Think You’d Like to Write a Book…”
What is more evocative than the heady smells of summer—a freshly mowed lawn, meats on the grill, fat little funnel cakes frying at the fair? For me, however, the smells of summer will be tied forever to the summers of my youth, and the pungent aromas of the Massachusetts Swimming Pool.
I went back to my hometown this summer to visit family and friends, and to do research for my nearly completed novel, set in Buffalo during the late 1960s. As is so often the case when I write stories, I learn things about myself in the process that surprise me. I discovered, for example, that I still love Buffalo with a fierceness usually reserved for my fellow human beings. So I started to wonder, how is love for a place different from love for a person? Am I simply feeling an aching nostalgia, or am I feeling something deeper, more profound? Continue reading “The Buffalo I Have Lost and Found”
I am a gardener. And I’m a writer. So naturally, every day from 9 to 5, I am wracked with guilt and mild self-loathing. When I am outside in the garden, I feel guilty that I am not at my desk, butt-in-chair, working on my next blog or novel. When I’m at my desk, I wonder what kind of idiot willingly sits in a dark basement on a beautiful gardening day. Continue reading “What I Learned About Writing from a Tomato”