Writing happens mostly when I'm not writing

Agatha Christie once said, "The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes." SO TRUE.

photo courtesy
"miss pupik" Flickr Creative Commons

Life gets kind of crazy.  In the last couple of weeks: I helped out with the Friends of the South Portland Library annual book sale. Youth football season wrapped up.  Hubbie & I volunteered for a school fundraiser.  We went to the Maine Association of Broadcasters Annual Dinner where I received an award for my writing & producing (no kidding!).  My son, bright boy that he may be, hit a small bump in the road in terms of time management and the difference between "optional" and "required" homework (the lesson here: unless otherwise noted, assume it's required), and we're coming to terms with the fact that  6th grade is WAY more involved than it was in the early 1980s.  Parental homework supervision on high alert.

I think about this blog all the time.  What do I want to read and think and write about?  What do you, dear reader, want to read about?  I think about writing when I'm driving, when I'm doing housework or errands, and definitely when I'm listening to MPBN Radio.  In fact, the Agatha Christie quote above is something I heard on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.  Keillor can read poetry like no other, but what I really love about that segment is learning about authors' and poets' real lives.  They grow up, fall in love & marry & divorce, raise families in all sorts of circumstances.  They work at other jobs before they "make it" as writers, or, very often, concurrently throughout their lives as writers.  They struggle with personal tragedies and professional setbacks.  They write, and they continue to do the dishes.

One of my husband's college friends (and my friend too), Laura Kilmartin, has recently become a published author!  Her novel Next Year I'll Be Perfect is available now.  I have a copy - I'll be reading it and sharing my thoughts with you soon.

I'm finishing the non-fiction Strap Hanger, about public transportation (or, rather, the lack thereof) in the United States, and as a new feature here I'll be interviewing Christopher Alvarado, an urban planning professional in Cleveland who specializes in transportation issues.

Last week I read Jeannette Walls' Half Broke Horses in a single evening!  I'll be darned if I'm unprepared for book group, PLUS I found it to be a truly gripping read.  Walls' Glass Castle was amazing, and this tale about Jeannette's grandmother gives additional insight into her mom.... from another perspective.

To celebrate the season, I'm enjoying two spooky novels: Susan Heyboer O'Keefe's  Frankenstein's Monster is a "sequel" to Mary Shelley's original masterpiece - what does the "monster" do after the death of his creator?  Something interesting to ponder.  I'm about 100 pages in and his adventures are decidedly unexpected.  And Danielle Trussoni's novel Angelology dares to define angels in an entirely different way.

The sons of God saw the daughter of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose....There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them.  Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Gen 6:2-4

The premise is that these "sons of God" were actually angels (really, really sexually alluring ones), who hooked up with human women, and their offspring became the mighty families of Europe - the Capets & Tudors & Hapsburgs & Medicis, etc.  And they aren't as "nice" as you'd expect angels to be.... there's something to think about over dirty dishes! 

More details to come - as soon as I catch a breath, and put a book down!