Just thought I'd offer a quick update to the previous entry in my blog.

My uncle has not only been in contact with his daughter, but they have met a couple of times, and he has discovered that he is in fact a legitimate grandfather, with two grandchildren, one in their early twenties, and the other is five years old.

For her it must be a bit more of a shock to suddenly find that she has a large family out there, cousins, step-cousins, aunts and uncles, and against all...

If you haven't read the previous post, you might want to before you read this one.

Writing, Privacy -- and A Room of My Own

Part Two

The room, clearly, had to be painted. Yellow is almost my least favorite color, but I have found it a cheerful and uplifting color for walls. It always seems to reflect and augment sunshine, so yellow the walls were painted. Megan and my husband, our resident carpenters, filled a large closet with book shelves, we moved...

This starts out being general and perhaps a little polemic, but it becomes personal and rather happy, so please stick with me.

Writing, Privacy -- and A Room of My Own

Part One

In her famous essay Virginia Woolf (famously) said that in order to produce fiction the female writer should have a little money -- that is, an independent income -- and a room of her own.

She then went on to explain at length why this is so, offering many examples...

My current WIP is too long and wordy so I need to focus on chopping back - but how do you do that when you thought you had something relatively good in the first place?

After my first editing run with Teresa I managed to slash the first 28k words down to 14k, so have been applying those principles to the rest of the WIP.

When approaching new chapter:

1. READ first. No editing. Get an idea of what information is being presented

2. DELETION: is the...

Recently I discovered that I had a problem with Facebook. It was not really a serious one, more something on a personal level, but certain posts were starting to annoy me. Generally it was people sharing quotes and comments that were meant to seem funny and derogatory at others expense, coming across as smug and intelligent, when there were flaws all the way through them.

Of course if I responded it would have led to all sorts of arguments, so I hid away for a few weeks, blocked the...