Any writer knows we struggle sometimes with some pretty bad habits. There’s the procrastination. The overthinking. The self-doubt. The drinking. (And the accidental rhyming couplets in our blog posts, but I digress.) They’re all rooted in our impostor syndrome, the […]
Something in my life needed to change. As a likely Highly Sensitive Person, I needed to become more intentional, and at the same time, more forgiving of both myself and others.
Of course, “relevance” is subjective, and in the middle of major change, requires adjustment. Coming out of not only a period of burnout, but also an employment shift, I’ve been rethinking my own relevance to the different communities of which I’m a part; hence the quiet period on this blog.
The books I read last month were notable not only for themselves, but also for the fact that I read them just following a layoff — from the same authors, and in the same order, that I read the first […]
I pretty much fell off the reading wagon towards the last quarter of this year. It wasn’t that I didn’t read at all; I did, but I focused on pleasure reading, not analysis or review. I also read some draft […]
There’s some truly fine work being done all around, showcasing a wide representation of different social issues of our day, so the idea that my novella — comparable in some respects to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” one of the shows on the nominees list — will be among the stories gifted to celebrities means more than I initially gave it credit for.
Yes, as I wrote in my last post, I’m still in the grips of burnout; coming out of it slowly, making tentative plans for the new year, yet not without considerable doubts because I had such high hopes for 2018 and now find myself limping, feeling rather beaten up (if only by myself), into 2019.
I had big plans for Thanksgiving week. With the Thursday and Friday off for the holiday, and my sons off from school on Wednesday as well, I opted to take the entire week off, myself. I had Big Plans for […]
Many (though not all) of my stories start with a place I visit or see in pictures, which strikes me a particular way. In “God’s Country,” out in Nosetouch Press’ Asterisk Anthology Vol. 2, the story started with a swathe […]
The idea for this story is fairly straightforward. The local Islamic Center offered a screening of the documentary, “Salam Neighbor,” and I was curious, so I went. Watching the film, I began to wonder: how would my son, then 10, cope with living in a refugee camp?