Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
Category: Personal Journey
What Novel-Creation Feels Like, in Pictures
via What it feels like to write a book #writing #writerslife #amwriting
A Tale of Two Writing Gigs
Yesterday I had two writing gigs. TWO! The first one was in a library where the security guards pack heat, and there are two of them patrolling the aisles. It's a library where you get buzzed into the restroom and there find lurking an odor more corrupt than King Tut's tomb or my son's gym …
2017 in the Rear View Mirror
2017. Crushed it. Really and truly. Those of you who know me know I beat myself up at regular intervals. I raise self-flagellation to an art form. My friends tell me I'm too hard on myself. If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do me no harm. I like to think I have an …
Winging it with INK
I credit several people with my tattoo. First Katae, who made the whole thing happen and gave me a forever birthday gift. Next my husband, who puts up with this manifestation of a midlife crisis. My daughter Tory, whose trip to the parlor (do they call it that anymore?) got us talking about matching tattoos. …
The Present, Returned
In the Grand Canyon there is a geologic gap called the Great Unconformity. No fossils exist below this schism. Her timeline has such an unconformity: before age twenty-one, anything that took up physical space and could in theory become a fossil—lost as if by fire. Except the items she chanced to give away beforehand. Those returned …
To You. From the Turkey
This Thanksgiving, stop. Halt the cooking, put your flour-dusted, pumpkin-splattered ear up to the knobby pink mountain of white meat and listen. As you scoop your third helping of baked marshmallows with a dab of sweet potatoes, and your nether regions fuse to the chair, take note. When your uncle walks in wearing a Make …
Words Bridge the Gap: Cesar Egido Serrano Foundation $20K Prize for #flashfiction
Could you write a hundred-word flash fiction by Thanksgiving? How about for a $20,000 first place prize? Runners-up get a thousand bucks. And it's legit. I checked because you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true. This year's theme is the word, bridging the gap between different cultures and …
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It Ain’t Easy Being Real
I'm a laissez-faire teacher, which is something out-of-control teachers say to make themselves feel better. The truth is, I'm more comfortable allowing my students to talk, so long as I can get them to say, with some degree of accuracy, what I was going to say anyway. Today we did a little self discovery. I …
How to be a Writer in November: Show up and Throw up
Want to be a writer? It's as easy as show up and throw up. Write stream-of-consciousness. Write garbage. Write your dreams, your fears, somebody else's fears... What often happens in the show-up-throw-up process is: something awesome makes its way onto the page. Inherent in the process is a throwing-off of the shackles of self-loathing and-- …
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KL Griffiths 