Scrabble letters spell out "Ask for help"

Ask.

Here’s the not-fun news about having a book coming out: you have to get out of your lil bubbly creative comfort zone and ask people for help. The help that you’re not paying for, but people’s time and creative energy. For me, for whom these are my most greedily hoarded resources, this is hard hard hard to do. It’s not my default to ask for things. I always assume the other person will groan inwardly at a request from one more writer coming at them, palm up.

But we all know what happens when you assume, right?

lawn, lawnmower, green-1812944.jpg

Get off my lawn – or, just because you *can* write something, doesn’t mean you should

Twenty years ago, I took my first online writing class. In the early weeks, students posted short stories and critiqued them as a getting-to-know-you exercise. My friend Renee was living in Boston but had grown up in Minnesota, and the other students gushed at how her prose shimmered like wheat fields in the summer sun….

Cover of The Dolls House by Rumer Godden, illustrated by Tasha Tudor

Rumer godden reading week

I just finished The Thief on the Winged Horse, a book about sorcery and dolls that you don’t need me to bang on about in book report-y ways, since you can read all the glowing reviews in the usual places. I’ll just say that I find Kate Mascarenhas’s books challenging and thoughtful (she’s a psychologist…

On Bingeing, On Books

In a previous life, my job was to help people get normal with food — not so much the planning and preparing of it, but how to make peace with it. How to coexist with it. How to be one of those mysterious people who can have cookies in the cupboard but forget they’re there….