Eleven Years Wandering

Skinny the Thrasher Getting Ready to Dive In

Eleven years ago saw a different inauguration: the official start of my Wednesday Wanderings column.   In that time I’ve introduced you to little snippets of my world, including folks like Skinny the Thrasher, PF the Rabbit, and various of the co-residents of my house.  These include, always present, usually off-stage, my husband of almost twenty-four years, archeologist, Jim Moore.

Jim is responsible for just about all the photos you’ve enjoyed.  If you’ve liked my writing, he’s there, too, as my first reader, and patient sounding board.  Why patient?  Well, unlike some writers, who will tell you everything about their book, the universe, and all the rest, I don’t like talking about a book before it’s done and as good as I can make it.

This means that Jim gets sentences read to him with a minimum amount of context, or asked really weird things, like “Which [made up] name sounds cooler to you?”  Or “Do you think it’s okay if I skip to… Oh, never mind.  It would take too much for me to explain it.   Thanks!”

In this year of pandemic, where Jim and I have been shut down and in with each other, I’ve been more grateful than ever to have him as my partner in life and creativity.  Even more fun, Jim’s picked up the manuscript of a novel he wrote before I ever met him, and is working on it again, so we’re having a good time talking writing as art and craft as it applies to him, too.

In these eleven years I’ve talked to you all about writing quite a lot.  Some of these wanderings about writing are collected in my book, Wanderings on Writing, available as both a print and e-book.  The last year has seen my website bookshop much updated, and I’m happy to remind you that you can get many of my books, especially the older, almost impossible to find, ones, directly from me.

On Fridays, you can tune in for the Friday Fragments, tell me what you’re reading and see what I’m reading.  Some people think they can get ideas as to what I might be working on from my reading list.

For seven of these eleven years, Alan Robson and I collaborated on the Thursday Tangents, in which brought our cross-cultural perspectives to a wide variety of topics.  You can download some of these, for free, here as e-books in mobi and epub formats.

Now I’m off to write…  Next week, quite possibly more birds and a look at recent projects.