Ginger Snapped

I am currently obsessed with houses. Old houses. Giant houses. Houses with far too many bedrooms and bathrooms for my small family. Houses with porte cocheres and carriage houses and barns. Houses with fireplaces and tall windows and leaded glass. Houses with peaks and turrets and bay windows and balconies. Houses with libraries and butler's pantries and multiple staircases. I even found one with an elevator. I visit circaoldhouses.com more often than I should. I scroll through pictures when I should be organizing my tax documents. I look at house plans when I should be folding laundry. But laundry gets undone almost as soon as it's done, so why bother? If I lived in one of these houses, I would have a room of my own. In fact, I would have several rooms of my own. Probably one for each day of the week. One could be an office, one an art studio, one a dance/yoga studio, and one just for empty space where I could lie down on the floor and make snow angels, minus the snow. I...

...January... Agenda Nothing yet. Hah! I love New Year's. I love the open, empty expanse of a brand-new page in life. I tend towards synesthesia, and visualize the year sort of like a ladder. December is very far from January--visually, as well as emotionally and socially. I anticipate hibernation: days spent revising in front of the fire, lemon-poppy seed muffins just out of the oven, a pot of herbal tea at my side, snow falling. It's nice that I live in a fictional world, isn't it? More than likely, I'll be pulling my hair out about  a scene, scarfing leftover Christmas chocolates, drinking day-old bottled water, and pulling a wool blanket tight around my shoulders because I'm freezing. However, hope springs eternal. Maybe there really will be lemon-poppy seed muffins. Back An ice pack. A year ago, I sprained my sacroiliac joint after a weekend of thinking I was invincible: running a 5K, shimmying up a rock wall, heaving 50 lb bags of grain over my shoulde...

...October... I'm a little late this month because of what was on my: ...agenda NaNoWriMo preparation, visit from ma mere, Halloween festivities. ...nightstand Horten's Marvelous Mechanisms. A fun middle-grade read. I'm looking forward to the next one. ...desk revisions of middle-grade humor, sample chapters for a different middle-grade humor, and outline for NaNoWriMo novel. Phew. ...knitting needles a rainbow ombre woolen cowl for my sis. Upcoming: a pumpkin alpaca/silk chunky weight cowl for moi. ...counter the food dehydrator, working at constant capacity, dehydrating the bushel of mutsu apples I picked up last week. ...mind A new story. Though I don't like to talk about my writing while I'm drafting, this new project has to do with memories and the workings of the mind. It's going to be difficult to write for many reasons, but the advice to write what you think you can't pushes me to step out of my comfort zone. So I'm letting ...

Finding yourself without a computer makes you strangely giddy, untethered, though any normal person would feel frantic at the potential of losing three novels, countless other writings, and years of photos. Instead, you danced in the kitchen this morning. You canned tomatoes. You renewed your acquaintance with your drawing pencils. You made muffins. You feel seventeen again. Perhaps because when you were seventeen, people didn't have computers. Well, some people did, but there was no email, no internet, no Facebook, no time wasters. You couldn't read someone's blog from Tennessee, because there were no blogs. No vlogs, no podcasts, no technobabble. In fact, there was not much babble of any kind in your life yet, either. You hadn't started writing fiction. Now, without a computer, you cannot work. You are on an enforced vacation. The computer shop said they might have the computer for as long as six days. The bad news is that it might be kaput. The good news is...