Early Influential Book

When I was in college, way back in the late '80s (ancient times), Random House had just launched a papberback imprint called Vintage Contemporaries. Joy Williams was on it, Thomas McGuane, Jay McInerney and a bunch of other literary authors who were finding readership through the line's more mass produced runs and cartoonish book cover art. I'd been assigned The Sportswriter for a post-modern lit class, among other books I wasn't very enthusiastic to read.

Thirty pages into The Sportswriter, I was stunned at how calculated and perfect the language was, how logical the flow of the story was. I hated it. It began at the beginning and told a simple story. Some sixty pages in, I was appalled at how shut off the protagonist Frank Bascombe was. I was frustrated by his lack of action, his sunny, suppressed attitude. I wanted to toss the book away, I was so irritated by the lack of movement. But the characterization ... it was insanely good. Detailed. Vivid. Poetic. Profound. Frank constantly said things full of clarity and insight.

Later about two-thirds through the book, it hit me, "Oh, he's supposed to be this way." This is the tone of the book, this is the voice. It's meant to be like that. He's supposed to give a little try, a little nudge to his life, and then drop back into what he has, what he's already doing, what's comfortable. He's supposed to be a removed observer. The impatience I had with the narrator was the same impatience his ex-wife had, his state of dreaminess irritated others as well.

The fact that the line between the voice and its effect was so paperthin and unnoticeable introduced me to the power of first-person narration. It was the first time I realized, I mean truly understood from an artistic standpoint, how one could manipulate and influence the reader. (Please keep in mind I was only eighteen and I'm sure whip-smart eighteen-year-olds today would catch that right away.) But while other novels I'd read had strong voices, they were somehow dysfunctional in their musings and therefore obvious, but Frank seemingly didn't have any pointed problems. Or did he? The beauty of Ford's writing was its ambivalence, that thin line between a guy chatting you up and the larger story of his pain and history beneath the surface.

Needless to say it's influenced me greatly.

My Long Gushy Account of Meeting Richard Ford

Name Recognition

Often, in the dailyness of life, I'm overlooked -- not by my husband or mother or best friend, but the people unfamiliar to me who serve the public in a brief but bettering way. For instance, more than once when I've checked in at the doctor's office, I've sat and leafed through magazines for forty, sixty minutes before inquiring at the desk. Thereafter the receptionist usually keys down to my file in the computer and says something like, "I don't know how you got lost in the shuffle."

Maybe it's my face, maybe my name -- perhaps both are too nondescript to remember. When I put my name on the list at restaurants, I often stand with arms folded and wait and shift around as other couples who've come in after us squeeze by to go to their table. When I've ordered a latte at the neighborhood coffeehouse, I've had to read my newspaper until the rush clears out and the barrista and I are forced to have a conversation about whether or not I ever paid for anything at all. Once I checked a coat at a theatre, and later when I returned for it, the clerk -- after searching all of the hangers and cubby holes and back room -- laughed and said, "It's as if you didn't exist!"

That changed on October 25th, 2006. It was just after seven o'clock when my husband E. and I went into the basement of the old church reinvented and renamed Town Hall in Seattle. We were there to hear Richard Ford read from his new novel The Lay of the Land. The auditorium held just over 100 seats, small and cozy compared to the giant echoing chamber of wooden pews upstairs where I'd heard Adrienne Rich read her poetry and slack key guitarists play the music of Hawaii. Barack Obama's lecture, scheduled for the following night, had just been moved to the larger Benaroya Hall downtown while here in a low-ceilinged, poorly lit room, E. and I took front row seats to hear the only writer whose book had won both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award in the same year.

In anticipation of an after-reading book-signing, I'd brought with me not my favorite of Ford's novels, The Sportswriter, or the critically acclaimed Independence Day, but a copy of the nonfiction Conversations with Richard Ford. This assemblage of articles and interviews had long been the most useful, inspiring book on writing fiction that I owned.

It was packed with Ford's braided philosophical wisdom and unwavering humility and had been a guiding force as I crafted my own first novel two summers before. Every night for some six months, working slowly through it so as to savor the instruction, I'd read about the importance of waking up everyday and writing for several hours at a time. I discovered what writers Ford had learned from (Anderson, Chekhov, Cheever, Faulkner, Carver, and on) and I found an affinity with Ford when he talked about the difficulty of creating literature when no formal institution to shape or sanction the daily job existed. What impressed me most though and changed my writing life was that Ford -- one of the top five living writers in America -- insisted again and again throughout the collection that it didn't take any mysterious act of genius to write a great novel, just a lot of hard hard work.

After we settled our coats, I jogged up the short staircase at the left of the stage and through the door to go to the restrooms. As I passed through the hallway, I noticed an empty vestibule to my right. Beyond the vestibule was the back area of the stage, behind the curtain, enveloped in blackness except for one overhead light shining down on a desk where a few people stood clustered. There were two tall stacks of the hardback The Lay of the Land, its teal watery colors repeating in wallpaper-type stripes above the desk. And in a short second I glimpsed -- hovering behind the teal wallpaper -- the pale face and gray hair of Richard Ford.

I paused, my heart quickening, then strode on to the washroom. Of course, I knew Ford must've been around somewhere but I was startled to know that he was only twenty feet away from where we were sitting. When I came back through, I stopped at the vestibule, making sure to confirm what I'd thought I'd seen. The rep from Elliott Bay Books stood before the table, chatting while Ford, head bent, pen in hand signed book after book, responding in gentle expressionless tones to the bookseller's conversation.

I hurried through the hallway and back to where E. was sitting, paging through a freshly bought copy of The Lay of the Land.

I sat down, my fingers shaking. "He's in there," I said.

"Where?" he said.

I had little idea of what I was saying. I barely registered what E. had just said. I spoke to the air in a fog where people and book readings and chairs and the comparison of small venues to large venues didn't exist. "Richard Ford."

"Are you going to get your book signed?" His voice was casual and friendly. It was always casual and friendly.

I looked at my copy of Conversations with Richard Ford, the gold cover, the black and white photo of a forty-something man, staring indifferently out at the world with his mouth shut.

"I don't know," I said. I looked at the clock: 7:10.

A woman who'd paused when she'd seen me gawking like a fool at Ford in the hallway walked by us. She raced up to a white-haired man in a sweater, speaking excitedly to his face. The man smiled and grabbed a copy of The Lay of the Land and hurried to the stairs at the stage. I sat there, my heart racing. I didn't want to disturb Mr. Ford and yet he was twenty feet away from me.

I checked the clock on the back wall: 7:13. "Alright. I'm going."

"Alright," he said. His tone was flat and agreeable in that way he says things when he doesn't mind one way or the other. I went back to the vestibule and came to a line of two people. Ford had just autographed a copy for a tall elderly man and now the white-haired man in the sweater was before me. As Ford signed the hardback, the man chatted affably, lobbing him a few questions about his book tour and whether the travel was tiring. Ford answered him just as affably and when he glanced up to meet his face, he noticed me standing behind the gentlemen, my mouth fixed in a smile somewhere between ridiculous and stupid.

Soon the gentleman stepped past me to leave and I advanced. The Elliott Bay rep was gone, Ford was alone. His thin form was surrounded by a dense abyss of black curtains so that only the white light illuminated his lean figure. As I approached, almost as if swimming through a thick water, it seemed I was approaching the stage of an old '70s talk show, Tom Snyder or Dick Cavett, before the era when television interviews were filmed among faux windows and bookcases with lamps and wooden mallards and gold-gilt classics. The scene was a kind of modern Caravaggio come to life with Ford's pallid image glowing at the center and me advancing from the shadows.

Anyone's who's ever seen a photo of Ford knows his eyes are light blue, almost white blue, the kind of "ice blue" that writers often use to describe a dangerous or unusual or comical character but that hardly ever occur in real life. Ford's eyes, small and translucent with small pupils, looked out at me as if stuck, their color beaming against the gray-blue of his face, blending with his long, almost shaggy, biker-like hair. The thin line of his lips sat closed in repose, his prominent high skull-forehead reflecting light as he waited for me to near.

"I was wondering if you would sign this book for me," I said. I set the paperback on the table before his uncapped marker.

He glanced down, his delicate man-hands hovering over the surface before his face shot up, his expression a touch incredulous, a touch skeptical, a touch, startled. It was as if I'd just stolen the book and he knew it. With a pointed intention, he said, "How is it that you have this book?"

His voice was gentle and rhythmic with the accent on the word "how" and the slight drawl of someone who'd grown up in Mississippi.

I thought the more interesting answer might've been that I'd come across it through a brilliant but crotchety old professor, or found it in an ignored bin at Goodwill or the attic of a dead neighbor or the backseat of an abandoned car, but instead I said, "I ... I just bought it and read it and tried to learn everything I could from it."

His head swiveled up again. His body was relaxed and open, his eyes steady. He was observing me. Then in almost more of a pronouncement than a question, he said, "What's your name?"

Suddenly I felt as if I should show my identification to the officer or government official who wanted to either write me up a citation or send me some bureaucratic pamphlet. So I leaned forward, and articulated my name as clearly as I could.

He blinked, then his head bobbed in a slight nod. "Well, I'm sincerely pleased to meet you, K." His tone carried that earnest intention people in the South often possess, to be polite to someone who has been courteous to them first. His voice was smoky and oddly soothing.

"I wanted to tell you," I began. My voice quivered. My heart pounded. I pressed my chest with a hand. "Obviously, I'm terribly nervous, but I wanted to thank you for doing what you do because you said that it doesn't take any great genius to write a great novel, just a lot of hard work." I heaved in a breath, "and that was inspiring to me because it made me realize that maybe I could do it too."

His eyes pierced me for a prolonged silent moment. Then his lips parted. "Sit down."

I lowered myself into the chair beside his where his corduroy suitcoat hung over the frame, and I rested my upper back against the raised collar. I saw that his light blue shirt matched his light blue eyes.

He paged through the book, perhaps expecting written notes or highlighted passages but I was of the opinion that a precious book such as that one shouldn't be soiled with my own idea of particularly important missives. We then chatted about the book and its use as a resource and that the most important reason for him to go out on a promotional tour was to visit with people and hear what they had to say.

Then his thumb landed on the book's edge and he sprayed the pages down like a deck of cards. "Well, that would make this guy very happy," he said, "yes, it surely would."

Then he tapped the cover. "I used to look like that, you know." It was as if he'd found an old photo album and came across a friend he'd forgotten about.

He opened the book to the title page.

"What do you write?" he said.

I told him I'd just finished a novel, but who could really say when a novel was finished because I was always revising it, trying to smooth the prose and make it better and better.

"Well, sometimes you need to just set it aside and let it be finished and write something else." He spread his arms as if a bird taking flight. "Try to reach out and widen your grasp. Take other things in."

He turned and began slowly jotting under the book's title as we chatted about the craft of writing. Then I told him how I felt a kinship with him because of the unquestioning support he had from his spouse and that I had a similar support from my husband. He talked to me of the precious relationship he and his wife Kristina had. Both of our spouses were our first and best readers. Then after a short pause, I began, "So I know you teach at Maine, and I was wondering if you'd be teaching again this quarter."

"No, that was just a one-quarter-shot deal," he said firmly. Then he closed the cap on his marker and closed my book and said, "But every year I do this thing at Columbia for the graduate students," his voice was quiet and gravelly, "I'm there for two weeks and we look at stories, not necessarily my stories or your stories, but just stories, maybe Joy Williams stories or Shirley Jackson or Alice Munro. And I don't see why you couldn't participate in something like that."

We stared at each other.

I blinked, processing his words. "Oh," I said. I steadied my chest as it rose and fell in stutters. "How ... would one go about making that happen?"

His back was straight, his head high. His tone, offhanded and welcoming. "Well, I suppose you would just go through me to make it happen."

I licked my lips. "Oh." I glanced at the desk, the light shimmering off his photo on the Conversations book, blotting out the face. I couldn't ask to phone him, but he was about to slip away. I smiled, not wanting to ask for an email address, and sighed, my voice slow and meek. "And ... how would I go about contacting you?"

"Ah," he said. He bent forward and pulled out the thinnest, flattest billfold I've ever seen. It was smooth black leather and when he opened it, it showed the tip of a driver's license, and tucked into the slips, a mere two plastic cards. From the cash opening he struggled to pull out a piece of paper and out popped a photo of a woman with long wavy hair, Kristina his wife, I assumed. The picture wasn't a little portrait or a cropped photo but rather something like newsprint or a magazine sheet, where someone had cut around the woman's hair and shoulders as if not needing any of the extraneous stuff of a landscape or interior background. He slipped the photo back in amidst the two or three bills of cash and pulled out a sparse white business card. "Here," he said and tossed it on the table. "Write me a letter."

I knew Ford's book tour wouldn't end until mid-December but he did have a break around Thanksgiving so on Halloween I composed a formal but friendly letter thanking him for our visit and outlining who I was and my dedication to writing. I mailed it off thinking that now with the countless folks he'd meet on his book tour, with the stream of constant faces he'd speak to, and reams of pages autographed, he'd surely forget our brief encounter. I mean who was I after all?

In December I took his advice and set aside my novel and tried writing a few short stories. Over the holidays we flew to Chicago and visited relatives and forgot all about my brief moment of literary bliss. When we came home, I took the hunk of mail from the box and sorted through the stack of grocery ad sheets and magazines and credit card offers, finding a small white postcard sitting between a late Christmas card and gas bill.

I went to the sink cabinet to toss it away, thinking it was an ad for skin cream or ten-percent-off coupon for the pizza place, but it was a brief note from Ford himself, in his own scratchy writing, going straight to the point. "I think all you have to do is show up...." and on until "I'll let you know (if you write back to me) the final particulars. Good wishes..." My fingers shook. I paced around the kitchen, the dog trotting after me, then went out the front door and opened the mailbox to peek inside, as if Ford himself were waiting in there. He hadn't forgotten his offer, he hadn't forgotten our talk, he hadn't forgotten me.

In April I will board a plane and fly to New York and sit in a room with him and some twenty other students. Sometimes I wonder if I'll be able to speak with him alone again, and if I do, what we'll talk about. Or if I'll be the vaguely familiar face from somewhere that he won't quite be able to place. When I expressed the likelihood of this to E., he looked at me as if offended. "I don't think so. He remembered your name, he even said it a few times after the reading."

I thought of the question and answer session and realized he was right. I'd asked Ford a question about how he knew so much information to make his prose so rich and dense, he'd said, "Well, K., I think we all know a lot, more than we think we know." He said my name. My name. When he did, a number of people turned to glance my way as if wondering, "Richard Ford knows her. How does he know her? Why don't I know her?"

And though I think it was just his natural courtesy, I do remember that I was the one person in the audience he regularly referred to by name. I remember the odd heightened moment when people swung around in their seats, the bristling, the quick reflex of their heads, and me feeling the strange sense of being watched, being noticed, singled out not as one of the countless many but rather someone special, not forgotten, not non-existent, but actually recognized by the one person it meant something to be recognized by: Richard Ford.

Richard Ford and an Arrangement of Words

I tried to name this blog "First Draft" as a reminder to myself not to become stressed out by the need for perfection. I didn't want to be swallowed into the albatross-laden mania of endless revision and persnickety fine-tuning and an ambitious amount of content. Not for here. It was only a blog after all. But of course, the names First Draft and My First Draft and The First Draft were all taken (seemingly by bloggers who haven't posted in years, if they ever did) and I was forced to come up with another name.

In May of 2007 I had the incredible fortune of sitting in on Richard Ford's two-week writing seminar at Columbia University. The man had invited me himself (another story for another posting) and I traveled from Seattle to New York to learn as much from the Pulitzer-Prize winner as I could.

The class was a refreshing exercise in finetuning one's writing skills. From undergrad and graduate classes, I'd only experienced the workshop format, where some 10 to 20 students sit in a circle and critique each others' manuscripts. However, Ford wasn't really interested in reading any of our writing and thought more value lay in a different approach. He wanted us to examine stories closely and discuss issues of writing, then later apply the principles and methods to make our own work better. And he wanted us to do the change-making or editing in private, on our own. Find our own way. As Ford reminded me later in a discussion about book editors and anyone else who may offer feedback, "Remember, you are the final arbiter of taste."

Anyway, on the first day of class he distributed a chunky packet of stories and essays about writing. One of the essays was by a man named Walter Benjamin, a European scholar from the early 20th century. Benjamin had several revealing things to say about the novel and its format and one's approach to writing it. We spoke about how imaginative experience gives voice to what its like to be alive at a certain time and place in history, and Ford pointed out that the written piece's nature is to be artistic, a pulling together of things. "That's intelligence, a composition," he said.

He went on to remind us how each piece of writing, each piece of art holds its own value, makes its own contribution simply because it displays "words that are arranged in a way that they haven't been arranged before." I don't recall if this phrase sprung from Walter Benjamin's essay or Ford mentioned Dionysius of Halicarnassus himself (the Greek historian who first used the term), but the idea resonated with me. It's helped me remember the value of what I do everyday. I have a vision, I have a voice, and both are unique. I hope this bit of simplistic yet profound wisdom reminds other writers that their vision and voice are unique as well.

So Write Something

I have my friend M. to thank for helping me realize this blog's purpose and how to approach it. M. is a colleague of my husband's, a twenty-something San Franciscan, who likes to write as well. He came to Tucson recently to visit my husband and me. When the two of them weren't working, the three of us would hang out, going for bike rides, drinking coffee, touring Tucson and doing silly things like watching the Oscars. We talked about books and film and cities and religion and relationships. Every time I went off on some incident that bugged me or tried to analyze an odd person or expound on a pet life theory of mine, M. would say, "Dude, start a blog."

I mulled that over. I did want to share my observations and experiences about life and art. But what I wanted most to share were the struggles and issues I had with writing. I'd always thought it might be helpful to others. And when I talked to my writer friends about this stuff, it always helped me. But most blogs I'd found featured sloppy, banal writing by people who hardly cared about whether they were saying anything substantive.

I said to M., "But blogs are so sloppy, so first-person, and all people talk about is their kids' baby poop. Who wants to read that?"

"Yeah, but make it whatever you want. You've gotta share this stuff with someone."

"But nobody will care."

"Just put it out there, people will find it."

"But what if it sucks?"

"That part doesn't matter. You're a writer, so ... write something."

This led to a days-long discussion/argument about the merits of blogging. In the end I told him okay, yes, I'd start one, one that I'd actually set up awhile ago but never launched publicly. I'd go back to it and revive it. He was glad. "Just do it for awhile until you get tired of it," he said. How could I start something publicly and then abandon it? I thought that was very cavalier, very twenty-something of him to say.

Days after M. left, I made a good-faith effort. I went back to that blog about writing I'd started in fall of 2007. It seemed funny to me now. It was to be penned by an everywoman persona (so I didn't have to use my real name) who would speak for all women writers. It had wispy tributes to Henry James and Jane Austen and inspiration for all struggling writers. I had surfed around for hours picking up public stock art and photos -- and it still wasn't quite right. I finally saw it all as ambitious nonsense.

So I switched my focus to Tucson, where I live in winter. That was easy, it would just be observations about the city and the weather and the desert. I told M. about it. He was glad. But then a week later, I was carefully choosing colors and fonts and creating an archive of several entries detailing the story of my husband's and my settling in Tucson. After awhile, I was torn, thinking it should first be about that story of coming to Tucson, but then maybe about the city itself (more educational, with statistics), then thinking no, it should be poetic, like the dreamy romantic images that I actually lived through. In frustration, I abandoned it altogether. I didn't have the time, I couldn't regularly update it, and I wasn't a good enough writer to ever truly capture the beauty and spirit of Tucson.

A week after that, M. IMed me: "How's the blog?" I told him I'd written some of it but then got worried it wasn't good enough and started editing it, and then went back and did it over again and then realized it wouldn't be as good as I could dream of it being and dropped it.

White blank space hung on his end.

Then we chatted about other things. But that blank white space in the chat window bothered me. He might not have answered because he was distracted or didn't know what to say or didn't agree with me, but his response was silence and M. always has an opinion about everything. I haven't asked him, but I suspect he was disappointed in me.

That silence stayed with me another couple of weeks, through a weeklong visit with friends from Seattle, through working on two applications for writing contests, through a short story, and through reading Eat, Pray, Love. But it was Elizabeth Gilbert's website that pushed me into action. Her words helped me see that M. was right. I had stuff to say, I didn't have to say it perfectly, to create the best blog about writing in the world, I was just obligated to share it in the first place -- however it might turn out. So here goes...

Frozen by Indecision

I've decided to throw away my goal-setting ambition right now because well, I'll just say it: I Am a Libra. I know that sounds like woo-woo psychic mumbo-jumbo and true, there's little scientific evidence for astrology, but I can't seem to sum it up any more precisely than that. (And I've always felt this way.) I could say, "I'm indecisive" or "I like balance" or "I can't ever settle and commit to one thing," which are all true, but in short, let's just say I'm a Libra, with all the good and bad qualities that go with it. For those unfamiliar with Libras, a quick lesson: our sign is the scale. Yes, we do like balance, yes, we like things to be in harmony, yes, we are often peacemakers (we hate conflict), but this love of peace leads to wishy-washiness, lack of action, and worry.

For me this manifests in my approach to writing as "Should I make my character do this or that?" and "Which is the better metaphor?" or "Which is the more compelling scene?" and on and on. When my flash-deciding Pisces of a husband asks, "Where do you want to go for dinner?" I'm often paralyzed by the choices: Should we walk somewhere or do I feel like a drive? Maybe place A, though that's a bit expensive, and place B has just as good food, though place B doesn't have my favorite dish like place C does, though place C has terrible service." And on and on.

I often read interviews with established writers who talk about how they always write in long-hand on a sheet of paper before typing up a draft. Writers, moreso the older ones, are famously suspicious of technology and sometimes think typing on a computer will suck all of the creativity out of you -- as if creativity were rooted in all things non-technological, ploughs and bicycles and hand-pounding your own tortillas. But for me the computer, or more specifically my laptop, saves my writing sanity.

If and when I do try writing in longhand (usually when I want to write in the sun of the backyard), I compose a few words before crossing out the first verb that comes to mind and inserting another, then crossing that one out and inserting a better, more active verb, before going on a few sentences and then inserting a sentence with an asterisk I should've inserted when I first composed the earlier sentences. And by the time I've got a page, it's a jumble of messy penmanship, strikethroughs, asterisks, long bending arrows and squished marginalia notes. What a Libra. I change my mind a thousand times in my head before the final words go down. On a computer the magic of Backspace and Delete makes it all neat and clean and makes me seem like a more assured writer than I am.

So in my second posting, let me just announce that this blog may not be organized or seem like it has an overarching design or linear quality. This is a conscious decision. Otherwise, my goals will be too high and I won't write it. As Ann Patchett said (I think in Writers on Writing, but I'll check on that, and I'm sure there's more than one writer who's pointed this out), the work in your head can never be as good as the work on paper. One has to commit to the words on paper and in doing so, the Platonic ideal of your work becomes inherently flawed, just by existing as the work that was actually produced. So in the spirit of Elizabeth Gilbert, I am doing this because I'm making a commitment to myself and others to simply do it, but I can't promise it will be the best in the world. It will be what it is (and hopefully it won't suck).

Thanks, Elizabeth Gilbert

Welcome to my blog about writing, a website meant to inspire, inform and support all those out there who love language and love to express themselves through it. This first post is the outcome of my reading Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert's first-person account of her spiritual journey. If you're not familiar with this funny, vivid, contemplative memoir, please seek it out either through a bookstore or library (as I did). It's the kind of book that, while telling the story of one woman's transformation from depressed wife-who-has-it-all to untethered woman trying to get her physical and then emotional and then spiritual life together, inspires anyone who reads it into taking at least some sort of small action to make their own life (and maybe even others') better.

I'm starting this blog against all of my better writerly intentions today, Thursday, March 13, 2008, because if I don't, I never will. You see, I'm often at war inside my head about what to do, what is quality, what is interesting, what is the Best way to post on a blog. I've had this idea, for months actually (when I first created the blog and then abandoned it), that this blog needs to premiere with no errors, with lists and photos and recommendations and helpful resources and mostly an archive. A faux archive of all the postings I would've published had I been dedicated to writing my blog. I create this ambitious goal in my head, as if anyone out there, anyone who might be reading this now, would be disappointed in me if I just posted what I'm posting now -- a journal entry about writing meant to help myself and others.

Why, of all times, did I have a breathrough? Well, in reading Eat, Pray, Love, I had an epiphany (several actually, which is difficult not to do after reading that book, especially if you're a woman). But it was Gilbert's words on her website about writing that helped me most. She says:

One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: "That's actually not my problem." The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

And though I might have heard words to that effect before, under the most intellectual of circumstances, I didn't really register it, didn't really let it zing to my core, until I was drawn into her book, drawn into scenarios of a thirty-something woman (like me) eating delicious meals in the ancient city of Rome. About that same woman battling with her minds' wild thoughts in meditation in India. I guess my imagination had to be triggered in order to really listen through my heart.

So in an act of dedication to making my writing life better, and hopefully, others' as well, I'm launching this blog today and will update as often as I can. Some public blogs say, "Updated every Tuesday" or "every two weeks" or what not, but I find if I commit to a week or two-week updating, I may inevitably fail in that I'll be confined to a schedule and that, I suspect, is the quickest way, to kill the momentum I have going now. So I'll just say "as often as I can," which today, feels like it might be in just a few hours.