My blog

Welcome, OneFourKidLit readers and everyone following the chain of posts from YA authors who are publishing their debut novels in 2014. My debut is The Secret Side of Empty, about life as an [...]

For a long time I resisted the term “midlife crisis” when applied to me because, damn it, I wasn’t in midlife.  But, at 43, I think it’s safe to assume I’m somewhere [...]

I was at a conference I helped organize ten years ago when I spotted my first Blackberry. One of the attendees- a wealthy woman ahead of the curve on many things material – was using it to [...]

coming up!

Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines is an insanely catchy song that could wake me up from a coma. Blasting on my iPhone on a sunny morning in the new local park when I’m doing my 5K [...]

Now that I have my new iPhone with a working camera, you’ll have to suffer through some photojournalism until I get it out of my system. I bellyache a lot about my commute but I work in a [...]

[slideshow_deploy id=’1493′] By mid-morning Saturday on most weekends, I am in a full-on panic that I’m not going to get enough writing done.  And that’s because I’m [...]

Somewhere along the way, I went from “too young” for things to “too old” for them.  In my twenties, I was like a colt getting my legs under me, too young and bewildered to [...]

Your hair still smells like that faraway place, the one you went to without me. Foreign shampoo and laundry dried on a clothes line. Was your hug always this firm?  In three weeks you’ve [...]

Going through the notes in my phone I found a list of random thoughts I jotted down during the extended blackout after Hurricane Sandy.  Almost a year later, they’re a little funny.  A [...]

Ever get the idea that conservatives are looking at you funny?  That’s because they are.  A study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (shout-0ut to my Nebraska folks) suggests that eye [...]

By all accounts, Ted Cruz’ life story is inspiring.  Born of a mother who was the first in her family to go to college and a father who escaped Fidel Castro’s regime, Cruz went on to [...]

Channel Thirteen, the New York local PBS station, has revealed a series of ads mocking reality tv shows.  It makes me the teensiest bit guilty that I’ve neglected the station that saved me [...]

I bailed on speed dating this weekend.  Allegedly (and I say allegedly because this is story that I told myself, but I don’t believe for one minute) it was because I was knee-deep in the [...]

I just read Eve Ensler’s Manifesta to Young Women and Girls.  Click here if you’ve never read it.  My first thought was, “I want to read this to my daughter.”  My second [...]

I’m feeling too scattered to write one cohesive piece (if, in fact, we agree that my pieces are usually cohesive).  Yet I’m feeling guilty that things are so crazy busy that [...]

Rainy days make me sad, but not the way they make other people sad.  I actually love rain.  But, lately, rain makes me wistful.  It makes me mourn all the better things I could be doing instead [...]

There was nothing remarkable about date # 29.  It was what happened two days after that made it notable.  The date itself was what all first dates are:  a rundown of family history, some [...]

I once had a writing teacher who said, “Writers don’t so much finish books as give up on them in despair.”   At the time, I so desperately wanted a book deal that I thought [...]