Why in this age of ‘saving the planet’ do supermarket chains insist on adding their own totally unnecessary and non-biodegradable plastic packaging to their products? Take for example the humble Banana. Nature has provided this delicious food with its own sturdy thoroughly biodegradable packaging and yet when you by a bunch of them from your local [...]
Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line at the chocolate candy factory – who could forget that episode? The chocolates parade down the line and the ladies are supposed to cover each in paper and place it back on the line so it can drop into a bucket ready for selling. But the line suddenly [...]
Waiting to have your book approved from a publishing house is like waiting in line to find a job. The fact is publishing houses can only distribute so many books a year. Which means a lot of good books will go unpublished. “Wait”… “That’s yesterdays’ news.” Somebody figured out those independent/self publishers needed a stronger [...]
Like most people my week has been incredibly hectic, soccer games, home work with my children, Author school presentations, book signings and a book festival to boot. I have witnessed some amazing things this week, things I will never forget. I often go to schools and discuss the process of writing and creating with the [...]
We all have a list of annoying words and phrases that we’d just as soon cut from the language. Here is my list of words I’d like to expunge, starting with a hundred and ten percent. If I hear one more person say he is going to give a hundred and ten percent, I think [...]
Growing up in downtown Brooklyn, rough as it could have been never prepared me for winters of thirty degrees and snow, knee deep to a seven foot lumberjack. We had one winter that actually extended itself into the July 4th festivities. The previous winter, a friend would plow our driveway right after a major ‘fall.’ [...]
In my search for the people and the knowledge to help me further my writing skill, I have found now two editors who, though untried, are great people. Today I checked out Jason Black’s website – Plot to Punctuation (link below). I’d been following him for a while but in truth, I hadn’t gotten around [...]
I must admit when my son left home my heart broke. He was ready to tackle the world on his own and I just knew my job as a mother was not yet done, but I was wrong! He is doing well and I am incredibly proud of that boy of mine turned man, and [...]
My husband is the first born son but the third in a family of seven children. Every one of the seven siblings have distinct personalities and not a one of them is a follower. When it comes to neatness though, that attribute is manifested in degrees from unbending to laissez faire. I’m still not sure [...]
There’s been a lot of action in the blogosphere lately about Oprah’s choice of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” for her virtual book club. I’m too smart or too cowardly to make an editorial comment on the choice, the chooser, or the much-ado-about-nothing (although that last one sounds a bit editorial). But the kerfuffle did make me [...]
