Many of you know that I’ve been writing historical novels for what seems like forever, but haven’t yet published a book. There have been times that I’ve felt less ambitious about it, and times when I doubted my own ability to achieve my publication goals, but overall I’m committed to making it happen. For those […]
fiction
Recap of This Week’s Posts and a Throwback to 2016
Happy Leap Day, everyone! And happy end of February… I’ll be very glad to see March tomorrow. I’ve been doing a monthly retrospective this year, just for my own reflective purposes, and this month was not as much fun to write about as January. We’ve had a lot of illness, some disappointments, too much time […]
What Being Open Really Means
My word for 2020 is OPEN. If you’d asked me what that meant on January 1, I would have said it’s a state of mind that encourages me to notice and seize possibilities. OPEN prompts me to be prepared to act, and act boldly. It pushes me to take risks. On January 1, this felt […]
Summer Reading 2018
It’s summer reading season! I started working on my summer reading list a few weeks ago, and it’s… ambitious. Maybe impossible. I have 37 books on there, and I’ve only finished one so far. (Can September count as summer, too? I might be working on this list all through the fall.) There are just SO […]
The Downside of Empathy
One of the biggest reasons to read fiction with a child is to develop his capacity for empathy: a good novel will put you into another person’s mindset. That’s a vital life skill. Empathy helps with everything from navigating relationships to negotiating business deals and peace treaties. If we all taught empathy to our children, […]
The Summer Reading List Recap
Back in June, I announced my summer reading list. It was the first time I’d ever committed to reading a specific list of books within a set time frame, and I wasn’t sure if it would go well. I generally prefer to read according to whim and mood, sometimes bingeing on a particular genre, or […]