"Welcome to Twitter, helenlandalf," says the message in my email inbox. I haven't had the courage to open it.

I've been avoiding Twitter forever, for a couple of reasons. First, I'm afraid it will be a huge time suck. Case in point, I opened a Facebook account a few years ago, thinking I could go on their just to "check it out.' Wrong. As many of ( Read more... )

 OK, I know anyone who is a writer yearning to sell a book is going to hate this post. Up until last March, when my agent sold BROKEN WINGS, I was right there with you. I was sure that getting a novel published would solve my problems, both personal and financial. With a published novel under my belt, I thought, I could finally be truly, ( Read more... )

 My life is full of words. I teach Pilates and dance, so I'm always talking: giving directions, giving corrections, or just chatting with my students and clients. I do some freelance copyediting - more words; and, of course, I write. Words, words, words.

Last night, after a full day of teaching and reviewing the copyedits for BROKEN WINGS, I was so ( Read more... )

 Last night I went to the So You Think You Can Dance concert at the Tacoma Dome. (Yes, I'm a huge fan.) The concert was amazing, but what sticks in my mind was the trip there. It was raining like crazy, so hard you couldn't see the freeway lanes, let alone make out any signs. Of course, being the terrible navigator that I am, I got lost. One minute ( Read more... )

 Virginia Woolf touted the importance of having "a room of one's own" in which to write. I am now lucky enough to have such a room, thanks to a big-bladdered cat. Today I direct you to my post on the Elevensies blog, where I tell the story of how I got my writing space, divulge a bit about my writing schedule, and treat you to one of my biggest ( Read more... )

 It's almost the first of November, kick-off date for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, in case you've been living on a desert island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific). Although I love the idea of cranking out the first draft of a novel in 30 days, burning up the keyboard without looking back, I've never done NanoWriMo. I'm not going ( Read more... )

 Any day now I'm going to get an email from my editor saying the copyedit of my novel is ready for my review, and I have to admit, I'm nervous. Not because i don't know my commas from my semicolons or my restrictive from my nonrestrictive clauses - I've worked as a copyeditor myself, after all. No, my anxiety stems from the fact that much of the ( Read more... )

 The bad news: My book club's meeting last night was cancelled because nobody read the book. The good news: The cancellation gave me the opportunity to attend "Authors, Neighbors," an author event at the Sunset Hill Community Club, just minutes away from my home.

I walked into the room thinking this might be one of those pathetic events where a ( Read more... )

 They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is my thousand-word entry for today:


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 When my web designer told me he needed an author photo for my website, I panicked. I imagined having to pay a professional photographer hundreds of dollars for a posed glamour shot that looks nothing like me. Instead, I decided to do it my own way. That's why a couple of weekends ago, I grabbed my amateur-photographer husband, Steven, his camera, ( Read more... )