Real Life is Better Than Fiction

Writing is fun! Yeah, that sounds like a teacher trying to convince her students of exactly that! For some students writing is not fun. However, for us as writers, writing should be fun. We should enjoy it. When we enjoy our writing it will show and readers will enjoy reading it.  I re- realized this when I was trying to get my son to do a writing assignment for school. Writing is not his favorite subject. He was to use the alphabet to come up with creative adjectives to describe himself. Whoever thought this was a good idea for 8th grade boys obviously never had a boy for a child. He immediately thought of words for A, B, and C and by then was having so much fun entertaining himself he could hardly write for laughing. He finished the assignment because he was having fun. Next time your writing becomes a chore, take a few steps back. Maybe put one project away and work on something else. It’s okay to work on something that will never be published. It can be therapeutic and do...

It’s here! As some of you may know my mother was also a writer. She and her cousin Kathy could often be found writing together when they were teenagers. Fortunately, my grandfather was an avid photographer and captured those memories on film. I actually have some letters that my mom and her cousin wrote back and forth to each other. They signed them “Little Joe” and “Hos.” Obviously Bonanza was one of their favorite television shows. My mother also had a deep love of history, mainly the Civil War. She and my father belonged to the North-South Skirmish Association, which is similar to reenacting, but the regiments compete at target shooting instead of recreating battles and shooting at each other.   I remember one day when I was young, Mom asked me to clean out from under the couch – that was where we crammed everything when unexpected company came. I took the broom and slid it across the floor from one end of the couch to the other. For the most part it was the u...

The longer I’m married, the more important anniversaries are to me. It seems that more and more marriages are falling apart around us while my husband and I work hard to hold together what we have. It’s not always easy – I can be extremely stubborn at times!    While my family loved Randy, I think we did everything we could to scare him away. One of those times was when we took Randy camping with us. It didn’t end up being the trip of a lifetime for him, yet it was one none of us will ever forget.   On the way to the campsite, we were all fooling around in the car, not thinking that anything was amiss behind us. Only after we arrived at the campsite did we realize the camper door latch was broken and the door had been hanging open for we don’t know how long. Since Randy was the last to pack, all of his belongings were just inside the door. All his stuff fell out of the camper somewhere along the way.   There was nothing we could do, all his things were lost...

  I have always enjoyed spring. Perhaps it’s because winter was so long in NY where I grew up that being able to go outdoors without bundling up was a blessing. (Although spring seems to be slow in coming to VA this year. It snowed yesterday!)   One of the things I loved most about spring was the flowers. When the green tips of the daffodils would first peek through the soil my mom would announce that spring would indeed come despite how much it snowed after she made her announcement. Lilacs are my favorite spring flowers probably because of a combination of their beautiful scent and their purple color. Purple is my favorite. What I wrote about lilacs in my book Come Eat at My Table was one of those things from my real life. At the house where I grew up we had a huge lilac bush. We actually called it a tree because it was so big. Each spring the bush/tree would be full of blossoms. My mom would take some scissors out and cut a bunch of those blossoms to bring in...