Summer Shoes

She heard her cell phone ding as she grazed the aisles for groceries to fill her summer cupboards.  It was her first day back to her New Hampshire hideaway, and already she was being bugged. She glanced at her phone. “Call realtor about electrician. 603-526-7654.”   It was from her secretary, Karen, 3,000 miles away in California. What electrician? She wondered.  And how did her secretary get involved?

She rolled her cart onward. Maybe she was…

A day on which a life changes forever always begins as ordinary – so ordinary that thereafter, daily life is a deliberate celebration.



Carolyn Roy-Bornstein writes about an ordinary day gone awry in her new memoir “Crash: A Mother, a Son, and the Journey from Grief to Gratitude.” In her engrossing narrative, Bornstein divides her life “into two unequal parts. A line, like a crack in the glass, which carves time and events into two: those that occurred before the crash and those that…

Things are very rugged over here. This writing is by candlelight and the battery on computer is about to die. That's all folks. Signing off from stinky-ville,

Phoebe

Check out my new blog!  http://parksithere.blogspot.com/2012/10/moving-on-post-divorcejust-do-it.html

Growing up, my family attended the First Presbyterian Church in New Bern, N.C.  On Sunday I would be dressed in a hand-me-down from one of my sisters who may have received it from one of our cousins, which meant by the time it made to me it would be faded and…

The author website (or blog) is an essential book marketing tool, and authors often ask how they can get more traffic to their website. To answer that question, let's first think about the ways that people land on websites.



As an example, I'll discuss sources of traffic (according to Google Analytics) to my Savvy Book Marketer website during a recent month:



Search Traffic:  About 47% of visitors found my site through a search engine like Google. Most of…

1. No Halloween parties with girls dressed like slutty Barbie and slutty Little Bo Peep and slutty Cinderella and slutty Rainbow Bright (Although, who are we kidding. That girl got…

Part nostalgia, part evolving, part coming to terms.

Today’s Generous Soul goes out to Jinny Barrish. (Remember? The Indiegogo Campaign? So we can publish our book? You can be a generous soul, too! CLICK HERE.)

Laura Tompkins was born Geraldine “Jinny” Barrish in 1915 in El Paso, Texas. Her father was a…

I've posted a poem for Halloween, "Witches' Wine":

http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2012/10/witches-wine-halloween-poem.html

Here's a Halloween treat for those who write for children and teens: My co-blogger, Esther Hershenhorn, has posted an interview with literary agent Mary Kole today on our TeachingAuthors blog. Mary blogs at the wonderful Kidlit.com site, and she has just released her book Writing Irresistible Kidlit (Writer’s Digest). I hope everyone will stop by to learn what Mary considers the…

So, the kids and I survived our first storm completely on our own.  I never thought I'd utter these words, "Thank god for teenagers."  My two oldest and able-bodied worked by my side getting our house ready for Sandy without complaint.  I had to venture onto our roof to clean out some leaf clogged gutters that plague us with water damage every storm. My daughter Riley climbed a ladder next to me and forgot about all her girly queasiness and fears of spiders. She reached in and pulled out…

Last week I shared a little bit about the value of collecting "clips"-- copies of articles-- to add to your writing resume. Hopefully you felt inspired and decided, sure you'd like to write an article or two. After all, you have good writing skills, you can whip out 1000 words fairly easily. Let's do this! But maybe you pulled up Word, stared at the blank screen and searched your brain for ideas and...nothing. Panic set in.…

Of Monsters and Men

(Walking bravely through the snow and comet-fall.)

In other news, I am going to take November and December and try to finish at least one of the two novels I'm working on. It makes it harder, the fact that I keep bouncing back and forth between the two. (And being a perfection-ection-ectionist.)

www.phoebewilcox.com  

seemed pleasant, aye, lunch at the bird in hand,

all sunday lunch on monday,

i had the soup surrounded with bibelots,

winston churchill. kind ladies worried

about our welfare and nourishment.

i met pompidou, bridle paths, dark houses

in the north, arrived to slide the cobbles.

how many coats in your cloakroom sir, one hundred?

how many live here? five horses, and look at your menage a troi...

armed with directions, satellite, the…

two years and one month.  living abroad.  things i miss.  contested.  

http://newmeland-nz.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-two-year-rebuttal-by-meg-mason.html