C a r o l y n D a u g h t e r s

To get to Florissant, you drive through Woodland Park and Divide. Once you get to the Hoot n’ Holler, you confirm that your cell service isn’t working and pull over. Surely Theresa will find you. While waiting, watch an SUV pull into the winding H&H driveway and consider spending Christmas with them. They seem nice. They waved as they passed. Surely they’ll take me in.

But Theresa shows up, and the Hollerites are denied (spared?) my guestly presence.

Florissant has it all. First, there are endless Settlers of Catan games, all of which I lose because I refer to grain as straw, … Continue Reading

In an interview with The Economist, author Jeffrey Eugenides was asked why he writes so much about death and suicide. He said, “I think the suicides in [The Virgin Suicides] came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly. The suicides … represented the dying of my home town. [I was writing about] the brevity of life, or the impermanence of all things.”

I visited Detroit this past summer to see my college roommate Laura Es Mi Amiga, her family, … Continue Reading

Folks, I have 8 more days to hit my personal goal of 30,000 words for my novel in November, and guess what? I’m up to 24,508 words. For the uninitiated, that’s 74 double-spaced pages in Times Roman 12 font. Woo!

Now, most published novels are anywhere from 70,000 to 150,000 words (150-300 printed pages) in length. So that means that by the end of November, I’ll be 20-50% done.

Right?

Wrong.

In order to knock out 30,000 words in November, I’ll have had to knock out 30,000 words in November. That means I’ll have had to dump loads of crap onto the page. Appallingly … Continue Reading