What I'm Writing
Here's where I talk about my ongoing projects.
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Achievement Unlocked: Adobe InDesign (plus a Sneak Peek at Some Illustrations and Cover Designs)
What it was like to learn InDesign: You walk into a craft store simply knowing that you want to have a pretty house. You feel your eyes get big as your wallet gasps and then you find yourself in the clearance section at the back of the store maybe picking out some beads. Are you frightened? Strangely, yes. Do you feel inadequate? You bet.
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Sleuths of 642 South: Ode to Hyperbole and a Half
I was an enthusiastic fan of Encyclopedia Brown, so the plan was to journey outward, beyond the walls of our house, even beyond the cul-de-sac, and to gather clues. We had a magnifying glass and a notepad for just that purpose. The only thing we were missing was an actual mystery to solve.
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Writing The Music Of Pedro: Weaving Truth with Fiction
The story is fictional but very much based on true events. It reveals much about me, my life experiences, and a wistfulness for how I wish some things could have been. --Sergio A.C. Pizano
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A New Ending to My Marriage: Dreaming Up a Better Story
There’s a reason I dreamt a better story five years later: "I was a shit wife" and "We were better as friends" or "I married too young" are reasons and excuses all in one, and less fun than invention.
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I Suspect My Dad Raised Me to Rewrite His Book: On Harnessing Words of Dis/Encouragement
Much of what I was reading voraciously at the time could be called uninspired, but it scratched an itch, gave me something to mimic, and it was published. I wanted more than anything to do what those authors had done and smell my own words mixed with that pulp potpourri.
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Swapping Bitter for Sweet: Miss Gilmore Learns How to Charm a Widower
After Mrs. Bell returned to Bell Hall not three days ago, she sent a note to Ludley Park inviting my mother and me to tea and quibbled not in telling Mama that she had great hopes of my being just the thing to “uncloud” her nephew’s eye.
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La Mordida: Francesco Pays the Price to Spare His Son
Francesco stood outside his store inspecting a delivery when Diego Cordoba appeared down the road astride a horse, leading a man behind him at a slow walk--Joaquin, stumbling drunkenly and tied to a rope that was looped around Cordoba’s saddle horn.
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Prone to Swoons: How Not to Write Cliche When You Are One
I blue-screened in front of the mirror, addled by a full day of beer and wine and a prolonged period of undereating. My body just didn’t have enough of what it needed to keep me conscious right then, overwhelmed as it had been many times before: after my wisdom tooth surgery, four-wheeling accident, childhood fever. I swooned, as I have discovered myself prone to do.
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When Black Wallace Met Shortstack
A loner by choice and a fighter by nature, Black Wallace would have been content to remain friendless, wifeless, and childless for the rest of his days.
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I Told My Dad I Could Never Love His Novel Like He Did (I Was Wrong)
I get it, Dad. It’s your baby, I said. He’d just finished the most current of several iterations of his novel and now he was trying to persuade me to edit it.
