A Valentine’s Day Charm
On my last trip to visit my parents, my father and I were sorting through some of my mother’s belongings. She no longer needs her fancy clothes and jewelry, now that she lives in an assisted living facility because of her dementia. My father wanted my help in deciding what to give away and what […]
My Son, My Mother, and Hallmark Cards
Several months ago I was cleaning out a drawer that should have been cleaned out long, long before. I found a file of greeting cards from the year my son was born. (I won’t say the year, but I will say he was born in mid-February, in the middle of a big snowstorm much like […]
My Grandfather’s Quest for Sulfa
I didn’t know my grandfathers as well as my grandmothers. Maybe it’s natural for a girl to spend more time with her grandmothers. Maybe it’s because both my grandmothers had more forceful personalities than their husbands, my grandfathers. My maternal grandfather died when I was not quite ten, but I had lived with my maternal […]
Two Fortune Cookies
I keep two fortune cookie messages on my desk. They were in cookies I got from Chinese restaurant meals I’ve enjoyed since I began writing a few years ago. (I’ve received many more fortune cookies from many more Chinese restaurant meals, but these were the only two fortunes worth keeping.) One message reads, “You’ll be […]
Winter, Wind, and Tumbleweeds
Did you see the story last week about tumbleweeds taking over the town of Clovis, New Mexico? The pictures of the piles of tumbleweeds as tall as tractors brought back childhood memories for me. The house my parents built in Richland, Washington, in 1962 was at the end of a one-block street. Past our house […]
What a Difference a Year Makes!
A year ago I was suffering from the worst stomach flu I’d had in a decade. And within days, my daughter would break her leg skiing, requiring me to leave my sick bed and fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, to care for her. Plus, my mother had just moved out of her home and into […]
Dragons and Clinkers in the B House
When I first saw the scene in the movie Home Alone where poor little Kevin tiptoes down to the basement and confronts the fiery maw of the furnace, everyone in the theatre laughed at his fear. Except me. Because I remembered a similar furnace from the house where my family lived when I was a […]
California Gold Rush: Discovery of Gold at Sutter’s Mill
Most of us who have studied American history are aware of the Forty-Niners—those intrepid souls who in 1849 left their homes to seek their fortunes in the California Gold Rush. But the Gold Rush actually began in early 1848, when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill. Over the last two years, I have posted about […]
Writing About Race in Historical Fiction
As a writer of historical fiction, one of the issues I struggle with is how to portray interactions between characters of different races. I could ignore the topic by not having characters of different races in my novels, but I think part of the purpose of writing historical fiction is to show the time period […]
Balancing the Myriad Aspects of Writing and Publishing
As I enter my third year of blogging (my first post was on January 17, 2012), I find I have to search my archives before I write so I don’t repeat myself. I was going to write a post today about having goals for your writing, but found that I had written a post in […]