Here’s what I don’t understand about the term “Work/Life Balance.” What is work, and what is life? If we spend roughly 40% of our lives working, then isn’t work one of the greatest parts of our lives? Work/family balance, or work/home balance might make the term clearer; but what if your […]
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Who Do I Break Up With? Fiction or Nonfiction?
Dear Readers, I need your help. I did a lot of soul-searching and brainstorming during the last weeks of December, and as a result, I somehow ended up deciding to write another book. Not the historical novel that I was already working on. A different book; a nonfiction book I’m super-excited about. The problem is, […]
Valentine’s Day: Literary Couples Mash-up
With Valentine’s day tomorrow, most book bloggers will be writing a version of the “famous literary couples” post. (Last year, my version was called 5 Great Literary Lovers.) I’m going to put a twist on it this year by matching up five couples who never met in the literary world. Some were written centuries apart, but that […]
Quick-Quotes Friday #3: Wilde
Oscar Wilde: no other writer is capable of putting so much humor and poignancy into a single, simple sentence. Here are some of my favorites: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” True. There is no one on earth who is exactly like you. “Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.” We should […]
What’s Your Patronus?
Last spring, I wrote a post called The Lesson of the Boggart. It was one of the most popular posts from my Blogger days (I switched to self-hosting on WordPress shortly thereafter) and one of my personal favorite book-centric posts. In the post (which I hope you’ll read) I wrote about the genius of J.K. […]
A Change Of Perspective: Cancer Speaks To Me
The other night, I was chatting with my mother-in-law in my kitchen while Edwin spooned pureed vegetables into his mouth (or tried to, anyway). I was telling her how much I’d enjoyed interviewing Marie, Laura and Lauren for their cancer stories. One of the questions I’d asked all three of them was how they’d changed […]