Journal Entries

I visited my aunt yesterday. The last of my mother’s siblings. Two years ago, at age 84, she remarried and moved to Dayton. Sold her farm. Sold the house she’d been born in. Moved into a small cottage in the city with her new husband, also a widower. He was once a professional musician, and the minute she met him, she says she longed to play piano to his guitar. I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but after six years of lonely widowhood, rattling around that huge farm house–she wasted no time grabbing onto that sweet man. And they began to make music together. If my mother were still aive, she’d think her baby sister had lost her mind. And maybe Mom would be right–being in love is a bit like being insane. And yet…and yet… As I watched her bouncing around on the piano bench, pounding the keys while he played guitar, I thought that perhaps she’d added another ten years to her life with music and hope and companionship. I applauded with my heart as well as my hands. Then Aunt Mary surprised us. She whipped out a harmonica and played a mean accompaniment […]

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I’ve been trying to de-clutter and simplify my life. It’s not easy, because I keep discovering more things to toss. I’m not just talking about knick-knacks, here—although I’m making headway on that front. So far, this year’s biggest clutter mission has been to rid myself of body-clutter—accumulated pounds that a wake-up call from my doctor is scaring me into losing. Then last week I was assigned, by an editor at Steeple Hill, the toughest de-cluttering mission of all—getting rid of 20,000 words. Let me tell you, counting Weight Watcher points is nothing compared to ripping eighty pages out of my beloved novel. As all good writers do—I’d labored over every word. Polished every sentence. There was nothing left to cut. At least that’s what I thought. With the carrot of possible publication dangling in front of me, I’ve spent the past two weeks eliminating all the cute little rabbit holes I’d explored, deleting dozens of “he saids” and “she saids,” throwing out hundreds of adverbs. I even deleted a couple secondary plots to which I’d grown way too attached, and you know what? The people at Steeple Hill were right. I needed to lose eighty pages. Every bit of word-clutter […]

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I was ten when I first felt it. I’d been reading The Long Winter, and became so immersed in blizzards and hunger and Pa Ingalls’ struggle to keep his family alive, that I was astonished when I looked up and discovered that it was summer outside my bedroom window! At twelve I discovered Jane Eyre, and Rebecca, and other lovely gothic tales. I became the heroine wandering in those dark, mysterious, mansions. That’s the magic of good fiction—that delicious sense of being someone else, someplace else, being taken to a place we’ve never seen. Unfortunately, that becomes harder as one studies writing techniques. We go to workshops, study books on writing, learn about plot twists, repetitive words and the all-important conflict. We pick up a novel and immediately start to analyze technique, word tricks, plot holes and weak characters. Losing ourselves in the story becomes rare. I miss it. And so, I’m extra grateful when I stumble upon a book that, once again, gives me back that elusive feeling of story magic. The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield managed to do that for me recently. There’s a bookish, plain, heroine hired to help an elderly eccentric author write her biography, […]

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