At the edge of the caldera, in the tiny town of Fira, on Santorini, my sister, Susan, and I peered out at the Agean Sea, marveling at a blue they created just for Greece. Our eyes traveled to donkeys ferrying people and things up from the boats docked at the old port below. I don’t remember which of us thought it would be fun to hike the zigzagged path to the port, then ride a donkey back up, but it was a terrible, scary, asinine, stupid idea. It was still fairly early in the morning when we started down the thousands of wide, uneven, cobblestone, horror-movie steps. But the sun that beat on the island in August didn't have a clock. We'd finished our water and worked up a sweat before we hit the half-way point. At the port we poked into gift shops, bought a couple of trinkets and drank more water before seeking out our animal transport. We climbed a few steps, handed over our money and sat down on the next donkey that waited beside the top step. A mother and her two...
Part II of my joining groups post: Recently I’ve read blog posts and comments from writers who’ve had bad experiences with critique groups, including this one here . I just thought I’d share the other side of the experience. I’ve been in the same critique group more years than I like to think about, and I wouldn’t be a writer without them. That said, here are my reasons for happily sticking with them: No. 5 I’ve become a better writer for critiquing the work of other people. Part of my day job is editing newspaper and magazine copy, not books. By thinking about what works and what doesn’t work and why as I read other people’s fiction, I learn to recognize those same things in my own writing. No. 4 They are all good at different things. Carol can see the big picture. She moves sentences, paragraphs or even whole scenes around so that they make more sense or build more suspense than the way I had them. Cindy, with her eye for detail, catches little mistakes, like if a car changes color o...
My Nana died a week ago today. She was 92 years old and lived, at least as far as I knew, a full, wonderful life, though she certainly had her share of hardship. She left behind three daughters (my mother included), eight grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. We were all at the burial and memorial service in Charlotte, NC, this past Friday. Five of the eight grandchildren spoke about Nana at the service. And I learned that she apparently thought we were all as special as I know I was to her. That was the theme that ran through all five of our stories. Here's what I said about her. I knew from early on that Nana loved me, not in some abstract, send me a card with money in it for Christmas kind of way, but in a concrete way that made me know she wanted me around. She introduced me to her friends. She wanted to know mine. She was a part of my life. I took all of that for granted until my freshman year of college. I was at Emory, living in a dorm that had been built in the 1920s. I...
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