The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: writer

  • A Cool Dream

    I usually forget my dreams immediately upon opening my eyes. But sometimes they’re so fascinating I repeat them over and over in my head until I can write them down. This was such a dream. In it, I was a writer. (Big stretch, right?) But I was living inside what I wrote. For example, if…

  • Having Something to Say

    It occurred to me recently that before you can be a writer, you must first have something to say. You have to have opinions and thoughts and ideas. You have to be good at explaining and/or describing things. You can’t be hesitant to speak your mind. I’ve always had something to say. No doubt about…

  • David Sedaris Will Never Read This

    Recently I attended a workshop with a friend. It was hosted by one of my favorite authors, David Sedaris, and the purpose was to help him with the final edit of his upcoming book, Theft by Finding, which will be excerpts from the daily diary he’s been keeping since 1977. Talk about some mad promotional…

  • Sentence Envy

    As a writer, my ears always prick up when I hear a pithy word combination or an elegant turn of phrase. All these droll fragments get stored in my mental treasure chest, to be trotted out on this blog when the spirit moves me. My thoughts may be original to me, but the way I…

  • I Feel a Blog Coming On

    People often ask me how I’ve managed to come up with a new topic for this blog every single day for the past few years. Frankly, it surprises me, too. I assumed that I’d only be able to keep up this pace for 6 months at most, and yet here I am. I think it…

  • A Totally Different View — www.nathanvass.com

    It’s a rare thing indeed to come across a writer whose voice is so unique that it comes through loud and clear in his work. Recently I met such a writer at the Fresh Ground Stories meetup group in Seattle. Nathan drives a city bus for a living, so his views from the bus are…

  • Stolen Lives

    Recently I heard an interview with Andrew McCarthy. He’s probably best known for his acting in the movies Pretty in Pink and Weekend at Bernie’s. But in this interview he talked more about his job as an editor at large for National Geographic Traveler magazine. Okay, this pisses me off. Not only has he maintained…

  • “American Blogger Killed”

    When I read that headline the other day, my blood ran cold. Because, hey, I’m an American Blogger, so I take stuff like this personally. (Okay, so my notoriety isn’t that overwhelming, but it still strikes a chord.) According to the Reuters article, the blogger in question, Avijit Roy, was based in Bangladesh, which, let’s…

  • “You Have a Book in You.”

    Since about the age of 8 I’ve been told I should be a writer. Indeed, I’ve had a few articles published, but nothing for pay. And of course there’s this blog, which is a creative outlet that I have found I can no longer do without. In every job I’ve had I seem to eventually…

  • Revealing My Soft Underbelly

    When you write a blog and have to come up with a brand new topic day after day, month after month, you find yourself getting more and more personal. The other day a rumor got back to me that several coworkers have been shocked at some of my revelations. “I can’t believe she would say…