Blog
WRITING
I bought a cottage in Ireland. You can write a damn book
Have you put your book dream on the back burner because you can already think of ten reasons it won't work? I was watching a fox and her two kits bound across the field one morning as Walt and I drank our first cup of coffee. In the upper pasture, a herd of dairy cows...
The Door of Confusion (and why I won’t let you walk away from it)
She walks into our first call with a story that could stop traffic. I'm not going to share the details here because they're hers, but trust me when I say she's lived something that most people only read about — and survived it, came out looking like Wonder Woman after...
The guy who couldn’t write his book because he was too busy choosing how to write his book
I have a client — well, sort of a client — who I've been talking to since last September. And when I say talking, I don't mean a quick 20-minute Zoom. I mean long, sprawling two-hour conversations that kicked off in the fall, meandered through the holidays, and...
That tell-all you’re dying to write? Read this first.
I'd heard about Careless People long before I finally cracked it open in the airport. It had been sitting in my Kindle alongside all the other fantastic books I swore I’d eventually get to. But once I started the memoir, I couldn't put it down. Which was great,...
READING
Gordo lied
"This is the hardest thing you will ever do." That's what Gordo, the instructor of our Intro to Scuba Diving class, told us while he scrawled his name on the blackboard. Gordo was a big guy, nearly 300 pounds of flesh that couldn't have been easy to squeeze into a wet...
Why I finally created book templates (After years of hating them)
As a chemistry major who really shouldn't have been a chemistry major for a whole host of reasons, I nearly lost my mind with physical chemistry. One exercise that I found particularly punishing was proving "proofs" for quantum theorems. I mean, how was I supposed to...
I never finished my book
I was sitting in a workshop at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, watching Scott Russell Sanders field questions about his career. If you don't know Scott's work, he's written a bunch of books and made his living that way, with a side of teaching thrown in. He's the kind...
What I’m reading now
Every Iranian New Year, we'd drive through Abadan, and I'd watch the flames shooting from the tops of those massive stacks—the oil refinery burning off excess natural gas like some kind of industrial volcano. The infrastructure stretched for acres, a sprawling...
LIFE
Better the devil you know
I'm sitting here this morning listening to Walt in the other room. He's on a Zoom call with one of his clients, and apparently the guy is reluctant to try something new. He wants to cling to his old business habits because, as my mother used to say, "Better the devil...
What forty dead chickens taught me about playing small
Envy killed the chickens. Or so my Bedouin mother-in-law believed. There once was a jealous neighbor who came for a visit. Commenting on the large flock of hens pecking away in the courtyard, forgetting to invoke God's blessing on such wealth, she drew the Evil Eye's...
Eight Books, Eight Lessons: Why I’m Not Slowing Down
At my 60th birthday party a couple of years back, something interesting happened. A number of my friends started talking about retirement—counting down the days, making plans to "slow down," fantasizing about endless yoga retreats in Mexico and Netflix binges. They...
Your Achilles heel is boring
My friend and I were seated together at a conference. I could practically feel the sparks coming off her, so consumed was she by the desire to be plucked from the crowd and brought onstage for an exercise. Leaning forward, she gripped the chair-back in front of her,...
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