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Is Quitting Sometimes the Greater Good?
As that old song goes “Should I stay or should I go?” For the last five years or so, I have been trying to return to the writing that I walked away from when I stopped teaching after twenty years. Twenty plus years of not writing, then I began again. Stops and starts; small steps…
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The Problem With Series Mysteries: Who Changes?
Writing is all about the protagonist, right? And that protagonist goes through some turmoil–yes, simplifying here–and then, abracadabra, she goes through some fundamental change by the end. Succeed or fail, she changes in some deep way. Got that? Never varies? Rules of the game and all. Except. Except. Really? What about Sherlock Holmes? Wow,…
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Not All Days Are Today
Each goes to our own corners, This welcome May-warm April Sunday. My husband claims the bed, Supine, hands crossed over belly, Feet crossed at ankles, A double helix at rest. The old, skinny cat A circle in his heated bed. No day too warm for his frail bones, Head resting on a catnip mouse almost…
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Snippet 2 of Taoist Mystery: Being With Nothingness
Obviously, the only reason I’m putting a few of these very first draft, rather random sections of my work ‘in progress,’ I’ll call it loosely, is to find out whether any readers out there would be the slightest bit interested in continuing if they stumbled across this: would you want to know any who, what,…
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Snippet from early stages of my Taoist mystery
The ditch didn’t exist yesterday. Then again, I didn’t exist yesterday, at least not the “I” that was standing at the edge of a ragged ditch stretching from three feet to my left up the dunes into the trees. Right. Everything Changes. I knew that part. But a ditch doesn’t just become a ditch overnight.…
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‘Bash It Out Now; Tart It Up Later’
Whether or not that’s really what Nick Lowe used to tell the bands he was producing, it’s an excellent method of doing…well, just about anything. So here goes, bashing: I want to write. I want to write daily. I want to write as “the thing I do.” I don’t want to do this because I’m…
Jo Chern 