storyfires

Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.                                         --Ray Bradbury                             I read this quote on Ann Dee Ellis's blog today and  it was like getting hit in the head with a pine cone. Ray Bradbury is a hero of mine. He graduated from the library instead of college. He writes original, inimitable stuff. a pine cone I started writing because I loved it. I loved it so much I could write myself out of a depression, and that's a big deal. I was totally in love. me, in love I didn't know what I was doing. A lot of what I wrote was buffalo chips, destined for the fire. But I was having too much fun to care. ...

I know tons of people who want to write a book.  Maybe it was the easy success of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named with those vampire books, but at least three people within a couple of blocks of my house all say they're writing books.  So when my son came home one day and said, oh, by the way, so-and-so from work is writing a book about a boy who grew up in Needles, California, my husband announced, "Everybody is writing a book. I'm going to write one."  And he made one up on the spot, about a kid who grew up in Needles, California. My kids quote the entire thing on a regular basis, which isn't hard, because it's really short. Here it is: "It sure is hot out here," said Billy, as he looked across the barren wasteland that he called home. "Mom, can I have a cookie?"  "Sure, Honey, it's the least I can do since we live in such a crappy place," she said, wondering why she'd ever married a man who would move to a place ...

Time has a way of evaporating sometimes. It has nothing to do with fun. It just disappears, like steam. I guess that's what happened to July, because somehow today is the second Tuesday in August, and a whole month is gone, and I don't know how it happened. The sun came out and, poof! I wasn't writing. Riding, yes. Finally fixed my bike. But writing? Not on the new novel. Obviously not blog posts. Letters either. Both my sisters are probably mad at me. Here's what I remember: *We lost the dog and chased him down.  *Worked hours in garden , which is growing like green demons.  *Hiked mountains .  *It poured rain every afternoon. In Utah. Where the total rainfall is 15 inches a year. *I injured my Achilles and rehabilitated it. Didn't see doctor.  *Read book on barefoot running . *Read book on plot because I was mired in mine. Think I found my way out.  * Ran barefoot with dog and kids in squishy park grass.  * Experi...

Hey, all. Time for our June blog book give-away drawing. I'm using my uber-high-tech method of randomly selecting a name that I've scrawled on a folded orange sticky note and thrown in a cereal bowl, along with a lot of other orange folded sticky notes. uber-high-tech selection process I close my eyes, reach in, unfold the paper... And the winner is Jamie ! You get a free book! Email me your physical address and I'll get Leviathan in the mail right away. Everyone else, head to the library right now and get yourself a copy. Unless you happen to be my sister, and you happen to live in Brazil or Fiji, and summer happens to be winter where you live, and books in English are harder to come by than they ought to be, in which case I might send you a copy anyway. Happy reading!

Perhaps you didn't believe me when I said that reading can make you sexier . Or skinnier , especially if you didn't click on the link in the last post, but it's true. Young girls who read a book about an overweight girl who made positive life-style changes had a reduced Body Mass Index after six months, compared to a control group, whose BMI increased. See how skinny she's getting? See the stack of books she's reading? Literature can be powerful, have I mentioned that before? Even though the book sounded utterly BORING. Which, I guess, suggests reading could also make you fatter if you read an equally boring book that promoted unhealthy lifestyles. Or you could read an interesting book and perhaps magically loose weight anyway. Because the authors of the study didn't use a second control group of girls who read a very exciting book that had nothing whatsoever to do with weight loss and compare their weight at the end of the study. So maybe it really was...