Cooking back to reality

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Snow woman

February 10, 2011

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Protesting

I was walking my dog while talking on the phone with my older daughter two nights ago, and I asked her if she was protesting. She is a young woman in Austin, TX. and women were marching on the capitol to protest the legislature's determination to end legal abortions in Texas. "I did go down there," she said, "and I'll bike back down there again tonight, but I'm feeling cynical." She told me that they were trying to recapture the spirit of the night of the filibuster, but that had been spontaneous. But that wasn't the only problem. "It's kind of like a pep rally, isn't it?" I said. She agreed. She did go into the legislature building and face off with anti-abortion activists. She said it was the only time it felt useful. Otherwise, the speakers are preaching to the choir. I remember feeling the same way the first time I marched on Washington, back in 1980, an anti-nuclear rally. We were a huge crowd of people who agreed with

Requiem for the landline

We finally dropped the landline. It’s not like we use it. We roll our eyes when it rings. It’s always pollsters or people asking for money. The phone isn’t conveniently located in the house. I’m always dodging junk trying to answer it. And people can use it to case our house, like back in the bad old days before caller ID. Maybe I should be more touched than I am. The first time I had a phone in my room, I was 13. We moved to a house that had a jack in every bedroom. Somebody had left a phone in mine. This was in the days when phones came with your phone service. You didn’t own them, and you got charged for them. I guess Ma Bell lost track of this one. The summer we moved to Raleigh, we didn’t bother getting a phone. The only people I knew there lived on my block, and I could use the phones at work. I occasionally called my parents from the neighbor’s house, and made sure I paid them when the bill came in. After sharing houses in college, it was second nature for all of u

Learning from others' critiques

I had pulled back on querying Calling Home because I was having trouble writing a clear pitch. It is seven stories, not one, even though there is a common thread. I volunteered at Killer Nashville mystery writers convention this weekend. I moderated three roundtable sessions, where people have the first two pages of their manuscripts read aloud (mostly by me) and critiqued by agents and editors. Which means I heard sixty critiqu es of other people's work in two days. I learned a few things. One is that I should have more confidence in my writing. While I'm sure they would have found plenty that needs fixing in my writing, I'm probably closer to where I need to be than most of these people who were pitching. The other is that I have an alternate issue to deal with. A common problem was that stories needed to start closer to where the action is. People took too long to set it up. While I didn't get critiqued, I think I started too far in. I need a short first chapter t

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