The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: Writing

  • Giving Your Artistic Baby Away

    There comes a time in the creative process when you have to place your art in the hands of someone else. This happens with writers, painters, musicians, sculptors, and anyone else who forms something in his or her imagination and goes on to give it life. If you can conceive of something and make it…

  • It’s the Readers Who Make the Magic

    If you have somehow managed to escape all my shameless self-promotion in recent months, here’s what you need to know: I wrote a book! A Bridgetender’s View: Notes on Gratitude is available on Amazon.com in paperback form, and soon it will also be available as an e-book for Kindle, and Amy Sassenberg’s photos will be…

  • My Very First Royalty Check

    When I wrote my book and created the website for it, I had to rent a post office box. I didn’t want to put my home address out there for the whole world to see. Granted, the odds of my acquiring a stalker based on a book about gratitude are probably pretty slim. (It’s hardly…

  • Do You Feel Like You’re Being Watched?

    As anyone who regularly reads my blog knows, I spend a great deal of time on my drawbridge, watching the world in minute detail. I know the routines of hundreds of people. I know who owns what dog. I know the cycles of the seasons, the migration patterns, and the angles of the sun at…

  • When I’ve Made My Point, I Stop.

    I never really thought about the length of my blog entries until I put 120 of them into my first book, A Bridgetender’s View: Notes on Gratitude. Then suddenly it became an issue because I noticed that some entries would fill a page and then continue on to the next page for merely one or…

  • I’m a Hot New Release!

    Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d utter. I’ve never considered myself to be particularly hot, and I’m definitely not new. But I am, indeed, a Hot New Release, and I’ve got the screen shot to prove it. I’m thinking of having this tattooed on my behind. Once my very first book, A Bridgetender’s…

  • A Beautiful Elephant

    -That’s what my publisher/editor/coordinator/catalyst/friend Deborah Drake called my very first book, A Bridgetender’s View: Notes on Gratitude, when she announced that it was finally available for order on Amazon.com. “Huh?” I said. What she meant was, the gestational period for an elephant is about 22 months. That’s a long, hard, heavy load for a mama…

  • Hiding Your Light under a Bushel

    I used to be in a relationship with someone who wrote a diary every single solitary day for decades. That’s pretty darned impressive. He wants to donate it to the Smithsonian someday. The thing is (yeah, yeah, there’s always a thing), no one will want to read it except the most steadfast historians. His diary…

  • 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…

  • Your Blog Post HERE:

    Usually I find commercials to be an annoyance, but there’s one for the perfume La vie est belle starring Julia Roberts that has me intrigued. It tells a story, but you can’t really be sure what the story is. That’s one brilliant ad campaign, because it makes you fill in the positive references based on…