North Carolina
November 21, 2009
- I drove down the long gravel driveway to the Weymouth mansion Thursday afternoon with a prayer of gratitude on my lips. Coming here is like flipping a switch from the world of laundry and grocery shopping and doctors’ appointments and phone calls to the world of writing and nature and friends. Sarah Shaber was the first person I saw when I climbed the stairs to the writers’ section of the ...
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November 9, 2009
- I’ve reached the age where I know what I do well: I write well. I can structure the heck out of a novel. I can create characters who will make you weep. I’m a pretty good teacher. I enjoy public speaking. Then there are other things that teach me humility. Today, I sat in Starbucks running through my notes for a characterization workshop I’ll be teaching at the November 14th ...
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August 5, 2009
- I’m thrilled to announce that two articles have been published about me this week. The first is in our local magazine, All About Women, here in the High Country. If you’re local, please pick up a copy and go to page 43. If you’re not, go to http://www.aawmag.com/story/14299 to read it online. This one I actually wrote myself since they were short of staff due to summer vacations. The ...
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July 18, 2009
- Just got back from a 10 day trip to rural Eastern North Carolina. To get there we flew on U.S. Air - San Francisco to Charlotte and then on a twin engine DeHavilland - Dash 8 prop "puddle jumper" to Greenville in Pitt County. Rented a car there, a little Huyndai and drove out to Winterville were we made our headquarters. Along the way we could see some corn and tobacco fields with ...
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June 23, 2009
- There is a setting in my work-in-progress, The Lies We Told, that I need to name. You, my readers, have helped me name both books and characters in the past, so I'm turning to you once again for inspiration. If I use the name one of you suggests, I'll send you an autographed copy of The Courage Tree. Here's the setting: Picture a backwoodsy area of coastal North Carolina. In real life, there's ...
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June 4, 2009
- I'd like you all to welcome Alexandra Sokoloff to my blog. Alex is one of my Scribbler buddies here in North Carolina, and she is . . . well, she's one of a kind! And she's the master of intelligent, spooky books. I can relate a bit to what she writes below, since I lived in California for twelve years myself, including a year in Berkeley (when Alex was in diapers). I was only there long enough ...
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May 9, 2009
- I belong to an organization called Novelists, Inc., whose mission it is to provide multi-published novelists with information and support. It's a great organization. Recently on the NINC email loop, one of the long-published members pondered what those of us who've been writing forever had to learn from writing workshops. The answer, of course, is that we can learn something from every ...
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May 2, 2009
- This morning I wrote a scene in which a man and woman, just getting to know each other, are out to dinner in a North Carolina restaurant. The waitress takes their order and calls the woman "sweetie". Once the waitress leaves, the man asks the woman, who happens to be a doctor, if she minds being called sweetie by a total stranger. The woman replies that, when she first moved to North ...
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April 21, 2009
- So, as I mentioned, we checked into our hotel, the Blockade Runner, in Wrightsville Beach. The hotel was hosting the annual convention of the North Carolina chapter of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and those women were the reason I was there. They'd selected me as the 2009 winner of their annual award for creative writing, the Lucy Bramlette Patterson award. (That's GFWC-NC President ...
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April 15, 2009
- I'm thrilled to unveil the contest we've been waiting for! A while back, I asked you, my blog readers, for ways I could celebrate my twenty year anniversary as an author with you. Frequent commenter, Glen Pierce, took the ball and ran with it! Glen lives on Topsail Island, North Carolina, the setting for Before the Storm and Secrets She Left Behind, and he came up with the idea for this fabulous ...
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