Reflections on my mother

     My mother was an immigrant. She was born and raised in England, herself the daughter of immigrants (from Ireland). She emigrated to the United States when she was thirty and went back almost exactly thirty years later to England where she lived out the final twenty years of her life. I was her American-born daughter, caught between a yearning to have her close and an acceptance that the United States would never feel like her home. She straddled two worlds and, like every child of immigrants, I had to learn to straddle them with her. This is that story. It was originally printed in 2005 in the now-defunct Ladies Home Journal. I hope you enjoy it: 

     There is a black-and-white photo I keep by my bedside. It’s a picture of my mother and me kissing. I’m about a year old, standing up in the harness of my stroller, my hair no more than a shadow of curls held back by a small barrette. My mother is in silhouette, leaning forward. Our noses are touching. She is wearing a patterned blouse that cleaves to the contours of her body like silk, tied off at the neck with a jaunty scarf. Her nails are painted. A gold bracelet dangles from one wrist. And in her left hand, she is holding…a tissue.

     My mother died several months ago after two years of strokes that left her paralyzed and eventually, unable to speak. But this picture is always how I will remember her: elegantly attired, a lady in every sense of the word, and yet always at the ready to wipe a runny nose or blot catsup stains on a shirt.

     I am forty-four now, older than my mother was when this picture was taken. I am rarely out of jeans and sweatshirts. The only scarves I own are the wooly kind stuffed in the back of my mitten drawer. I never wear jewelry. My nails are too bitten to paint. And when my children sneeze or fall or get dirt on their hands, I end up frantically searching my car for a canister of towelettes which are wet and cold and nowhere near as comforting as a tissue.

     My mother always had a clean tissue—up her sleeve, in her handbag, in the pocket of her jacket. They materialized whenever they were needed, a safety net of protection and consolation for all the little mishaps of life: for the ice cream cone that seemed to melt faster than I could eat it, for the scraped knee that kept bleeding, the cold that came on after we left the house, the enthusiastic red-lipstick-kisses from my father’s aunts.

     My mother parented in a very tactile way. She grabbed my hand when we crossed the street long after I was old enough to cross by myself. She washed my long, thick hair until I was nearly a teenager because I had difficulty rinsing out the shampoo. She knitted sweaters. She sewed clothes for my dolls. One Halloween, she fashioned a Raggedy Ann wig for me out of a hairnet and brown wool. One Christmas, she sewed red polka dots on a stuffed elephant because I fervently believed Santa Claus would bring me such a thing. My mother taught me how to ride a bike, type a letter, drive a car.

     She parented by instinct, not observation. Her own childhood read like a tale out of Dickens. Born in London to Irish parents, she lost them both to tuberculosis by the time she was eight. She was sent to live in a Catholic orphanage in the countryside of Gloucestershire where the work was hard and the nuns could be brutal. She lived in a large communal hall with rows of beds. She wore hand-me-downs. For Christmas, she received an apple, an orange and a banana. When she was thirteen, the nuns found her name scrawled on a sidewalk along with the name of a boy she liked. As punishment, they locked her in a room for a week with only a bible. At sixteen, she ran away to London and vowed never to return.

     But the London of the early 1940s also proved tough. There were bombed-out buildings, nightly air-raids and long lines to buy rations. Rooms for rent often carried the warning, “no children, dogs or Irish.” My mother became engaged to an American GI—and lost him in a parachute jump at the Battle of the Bulge. By the time she immigrated to the United States in 1955 at the age of thirty, it seemed my mother had had enough of English life. She met my American father just months after arriving, married him within a year and applied for citizenship soon after. By the time I came along, she had completed her transformation from English to American. She’d learned to drive, gotten involved with the PTA, become a den mother for my girl-scout troop and developed a passion for American current events. The only part of her not American, as far as I could see, was her accent, which was something only other people noticed. To me, she didn’t have an accent. She just sounded like my mother.

     I grew up, finished college and eventually moved out of the house. I had no need of my mother’s physical parenting anymore. When we got to an intersection, I walked two steps ahead of her so she couldn’t hold my hand. I moved out of her reach the moment she produced a tissue. I stopped wearing the sweaters she made. I gave away the doll clothes. I still loved my mother, but I saw her as the human equivalent of the box of stuffed animals I kept in our attic: something I could always return to, something that would never change.

     And then, one afternoon when I was twenty-four, everything did change. My mother sat me down in our dining room with the sunshine pouring in, illuminating her shelves of bone-china teacups and the tapestries she’d stitched through the years, and she told me she was leaving my father and moving back to England. As she told me this, I had the distinct sense of particles moving through the air between us, forming a current that would forever separate the mother I had known from the mother that was to be.

     The leaving-my-father part was not entirely a surprise. My parents had been having difficulties with each other for years. The house of my youth—with its walls adorned with my father’s oil paintings, my mother’s needlework, their photos, books and travel souvenirs—had started to collapse in on itself from the weight of a life that no longer existed, like a ball with a slow leak of air.

    Dissolving their marriage, I could accept. Selling the house I could accept. It was the “moving-to-England” part that shocked me. My mother was not simply leaving my father. She was leaving me. Her only child. Her best friend. She was moving from the United States, the only land I had ever known. She was settling in the countryside of Gloucestershire she’d sworn never to return to. And she was moving in with a man I’d heard of only in fable—the boy whose name had been scrawled with hers on a sidewalk when she was thirteen.

     I was startled and bewildered. This was not the mother of my youth.  “You are an adult now,” my mother pointed out. “You have your own home and life.” Surely, she said, I didn’t want her to become one of those clingy parents who were always dependent on their children. It wasn’t like she was sick or dying. We could still visit each other. We could talk on the phone and exchange letters. This wasn’t 1945, when moving across the Atlantic was the equivalent of goodbye.

     And yet I understood why the Irish of the nineteenth century held a wake when a loved one left for America. There was a psychological distance that came with moving to another country. The money was different. So were the holidays. In England, Mother’s day—known as “Mothering day”—falls in March, not May. No matter which day we celebrated, one of us would always feel left out. Home movies from the U.S. wouldn’t work in British VCRs. The five-hour time difference meant that I couldn’t just pick up a phone, either. By the time I got home from work most nights, my mother would already be in bed. In miles, she may have lived only a little farther away than California. In my heart, it was as if she’d moved to Tibet.

     When she left, I cried for days. I lived in my own home, yet I was homesick for the first time in my adult life. We called and wrote each other often. She came for long visits every six months or so. I could see that being back in England had made her happier. Her blood pressure was down. She looked younger. She smiled more.

     Yet I kept thinking she would return. Perhaps when I’m married, I told myself. My husband and I settled in Tarrytown, NY after we got married, but I didn’t sell the condo I’d purchased in New Jersey. I reasoned that if she ever decided to come back, it was a place for her to live.

     She didn’t come back.

    Perhaps when she becomes a grandmother, I thought. When my son came along, my mother visited for six weeks. She knitted sweaters. She brought toys. But she never entertained the idea of staying. By the time my son was two, I began to see that she was never likely to settle again in the United States. I sold the condo.

     Our lives had settled into two distinct patterns of interaction. In letters and on the phone, my mother was still as warm and supportive as she had been when I was a child. It was when she visited that I felt the distance most keenly. Our relationship had come to depend so much on words and letters that we were rendered shy and awkward in each other’s presence. My mother stopped grabbing my arm when we crossed a street, stopped plying me with tissues. She no longer reached out a hand reflexively just to feel the touch of my skin.   

     In the same way she’d once transformed herself into an American, my mother had now gone back to being British. On visits, she’d act like a tourist in her own country, marveling at the low gas prices, the plentiful helpings of food, the way each state had its own laws. At my local grocery store, she studied the goods on the shelves with an anthropologist’s fascination. Once, she picked up an eggplant and handed it to me. “We call this aubergine,” she said. This, from the woman who regularly baked the best eggplant parmigiana I’d ever tasted in my youth.

     Her insistence on being English irked me. It was a constant reminder that she had separated herself from me—probably, I realize now, because it was too painful to do anything else. My mother knew that leaving the United States meant she might become estranged from her daughter. To weather such a loss, she knew she had to build a life that could withstand it—a life that didn’t have an “us” at its core. I know this now, but at the time, I felt each small betrayal acutely. Try as I might, deep down, I could never get over the sense of having “lost” my mother.

     I never told my mother this—not directly. It came out in little ways—the milestones in my son’s life I would “forget” to tell her about, the times she would talk about visiting, and I would put her off a month or two. I wanted her in my life, and yet paradoxically, I felt most apart from her when she was on top of me. Apart, we could talk and write openly about our feelings, reasoning that it was distance alone that kept us from connecting completely. Up close, we were forced to confront a certain reserve that had developed between us, a hesitation to get too close to each other, lest we be hurt again.

     The years went by and the distance became an accepted part of our lives, like a fault in the earth that smoothes with time and sediment. And then one December, when I was pregnant with my daughter, my mother came for a visit, left and never returned. She had the first of three serious strokes less than a day after her flight back to England. I was too pregnant to make the journey to her bedside then. I made the first of three visits when my daughter was four months old.

     My mother was not in good shape. She couldn’t talk or move much. Mostly, she could look at me and squeeze my hand. My letters to her were suddenly rendered useless. So were my stories and words. If I was to connect to her at all now, it would have to be through touch. I stroked her hair. I gripped her hands. I took tissues and wiped her face and eyes. The delicate dance we had done around each other for almost two decades had no place here. There was only the physical and immediate. There was no “we” and “you.” Once again, there was only “us.” I sang to her—and continued to do so every time I called and visited. In a small way, I became the mother she had once been to me. I don’t know what it did for her, but it gave me the comfort and peace I needed to let her go when her time came.

     After my mother died, I went through her closets and took home some of her clothes. I couldn’t take everything so I picked the blouses that smelled like her cologne, the sweaters she’d knitted, the silky jackets that reminded me of the graceful way she moved. I found her velvet bathrobe on a hook in her closet. It was a smock-style robe, with a zipper down the front and two slits for pockets. It was the color of a Christmas tree and smelled of the lilacs in my mother’s shampoo.

     I didn’t slip it on until I got back home. I was used to the distance, but my mother had always been on the other end. Now, she was truly gone. More than ever, I needed her comfort. I got out of my clothes and zipped up the robe. I felt a slight bulge in the right pocket. I reached a hand inside and found two neatly folded white tissues. My mother’s ever-present tissues. And just for a moment, she was there beside me again. I put the tissues back in the pocket and that’s where they remain, this little bit of my mother still comforting me.

As I approach another birthday...

     Considering I'm a writer, I haven't been writing much here!  The good news of course, is that I have been writing my next Jimmy Vega novel and thinking about doing a short story or novella about Georgia Skeehan (my other series). With all those characters running around in my head, I'm afraid I don't have much time for that other character in my head...ahem...me.
     How do you celebrate your birthday? My daughter's birthday is nine days before mine so we are usually focused on her. But I have something I like to do every fifth year since I turned 30--and that is, write a letter to myself and take stock of my life. Since I am not turning an age this year with a 0 or a 5 at the end, that letter will have to wait. But I will do a short one now.
     My father, who passed away in September, was a bit of a philosopher. And one of the things he always told me is "the wheel turns. What is up now will go down and what is down will go up." This has seemed more true as the years have gone by. Twelve years ago, I had just released my third novel and given birth to my second child--all very exciting. Two years later, my mother had just died. Three years after that, a novel I had spent two years working on was rejected by every agent and editor I showed it to.
     The wheel was probably at its lowest point as far as my writing career goes four years ago at around my birthday time. I had spent the past two years interviewing immigrants and writing their stories in their own voices for a project I was working on with an outreach center. Then I got word that the project was cancelled. I had no manuscripts that any editor wanted to see. I couldn't even get gigs teaching writing anymore.
     But the wheel turns...And the very things that seem like failures become opportunities.
     I wrote my "birthday letter" full of self-pity and less than six weeks later, I got an email that I'd been awarded a one-year fellowship at a college. As soon as that happened, the juices started flowing again. In a year, I had a book--based on those wonderful stories about the immigrants that I just couldn't let die. In two years, I had an agent. In two and a half, a publisher. And now, my fourth book is out, my fifth is due out in a few months and I've just signed a deal to write books six and seven (I'm writing book six now).
     And I know the wheel will turn again...
     So if you're reading this and you are in the "downshift" setting, please try to have faith that if you can just hang on a little longer, things will change. The world is full of changes every day--whether we want them or not. Cherish the moment. Believe in the future. And keep reading and writing.
     Signing off now--on my almost birthday...

Why the advice "write what you know" is overrated

For all you writers out there: I wrote this piece for the writers' forum, Backspace. It's in answer to the question I often get: "How can you possibly write a main character who is a male Puerto Rican homicide detective?"

  

     Writers are often advised to, “write what you know.” The thinking goes that only by experiencing something yourself can you portray it authentically. Here’s what I know:

1.     A child’s need for a bathroom is inversely proportional to the distance from one.

2.     If you want to discuss something really important with a man, hide the remote.

3.     Never enter a swimming pool after a bunch of preschoolers have used it. The same goes for teenagers and your car.

     If I had to write solely from personal experience, my novels would have all the excitement of a C-span budget hearing. I’m no Hemingway. I don’t run with the bulls. I type with my hand wrapped around one. Most writers I know are the same. We don’t write what we know so much as what we want to know. In my four published books, I’ve collectively written through the eyes of New York City firefighters, small town detectives, arsonists, high school students and undocumented day laborers. They’ve been of different faiths, nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. Some are men; some are women. Some don’t even speak English.

     Don’t get me wrong—writing from personal experience can make a book feel richer, more nuanced and more self-assured. When you’ve walked a terrain, you instinctively know how the ground feels beneath your feet. You have the rock-hard assurance of truth to grab onto when you find yourself lost in the depths of a manuscript. But not every writer has a personal story to tell. And some stories would never find their way onto the page if they had to rely on an eyewitness to set them down. That’s where imagination comes in. And curiosity.

     If you want to write outside your own experience, you shouldn’t feel intimidated about doing so. Still, there are some key things to consider:

1.    Some imaginative leaps are easier than others

    I started my first novel at seventeen, got thirty pages into it and quit. The main reason? I tried to write about a forty-year-old. I still believe that one of the hardest things to do is write authentically for an adult audience about someone in a vastly different age bracket. Most writers who do it well succeed by going backwards. The larger the age difference between author and character, the less likely, I believe, that a character is going to feel authentic.

     Conversely, it’s maddeningly difficult in my opinion, to narrate from the point of view of a character younger than about fourteen. Children think concretely. They don’t analyze cause and effect the way adults do. They work through problems and situations without self-pity. Even when they’re victims, they often don’t recognize themselves as such. When new writers fail to achieve authentic voice, I think it most often comes from this “age” problem more than gender or ethnicity.

    Another divide that I think is hard to conquer is the parenthood divide. I’ve found that most writers who write believably about parents with children have been parents themselves. I know that before I was a parent, I couldn’t get into the sleep-deprived mindset that would make you weep with tenderness over your toddler one moment and want to kill him the next. Almost all of the characters I narrate through are parents. Whatever else we don’t have in common, we share the same fierce and fundamental connection to our children.

2.    Learn everything you can

     If you’re going to write about characters and situations that aren’t your own, you’ll need to spend a ton of time on research and interviews. Read blogs. Get on chat sites. Go on field trips. Look for the little stories and details that give a character credibility.

     For my new series about a suburban detective navigating the world of the undocumented, I interviewed almost two dozen undocumented men and women and spoke informally to many others. One small story always stayed with me. A Bolivian man went back home after many years of separation to visit his mother and sister. One day he was sitting at his mother’s kitchen table. His mother fixed his sister’s coffee then turned to him and asked: “How do you take your coffee?” The man broke down and cried. He realized from her question that she didn’t know him anymore. It was such a small situation, but such a moving example of the estrangement that takes place in families separated by immigration. While that story didn’t make it into my book, the feelings it evoked infused my writing.

3.    Inject personal experience wherever possible

    I’m the daughter of immigrants. I’ve gone through the death of both parents. I love Twizzlers. I hate tattoos. My personality comes into play in large ways and small through my characters—even characters who are otherwise nothing like me. They wrestle with questions I wrestle with—the demands of parenthood, the obligations of family, questions of identity and faith. The main character in my new series is a Puerto Rican police detective who has become estranged from his culture. His ex-wife is Jewish. His teenage daughter speaks no Spanish. The cops he works with are mostly Irish and Italian in heritage. I’ve never lived through his particular experience of displacement but I’ve lived through my own. I grew up as the only child in a mixed-faith marriage at a time when that was uncommon. Regularly, I got the question: “what are you?” I never knew how to answer that. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in so I tried to capture that same sense in my main character.

4.    Have fun

     You’ll be living with these people for months—possibly years (especially in the case of a series). Just as in real life, you’ll want to surround yourself with compelling, inspiring and occasionally humorous people whose exploits surprise and delight you. If you have that cast already inside of you—great! If not, you shouldn’t feel inhibited about going out and finding them. Writers are curious people. Indulge your curiosity.

     “I write because I want to have more than one life,” novelist Anne Tyler was once quoted as saying. I agree. When I sit down to write, my fun comes, not from looking into a mirror, but from peeking into someone else’s window.

                                                           *****************

Writing What Matters

Here is a post I wrote this week for the wonderful website: Jungle Red Writers, a site hosted by a terrific group of fabulous authors: Julia Spencer-Fleming, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Lucy Burdette, Hallie Ephron, Rhys Bowen and Deborah Crombie. I wrote basically to explain how I decided to write Land of Careful Shadows and what I learned by taking an 11 year hiatus between writing my last series and writing this one:

     First, a confession: I turned my back on novel writing before I wrote this book, convinced I’d never publish another novel again.

     In the early 2000s, I was laid off as an editor at Reader’s Digest. At the time I was working on my first mystery series about the FDNY, based on my husband’s work as a New York City firefighter. I went on to publish three books in that series. Then my mom suffered a series of strokes and died, my second child was born and my new novel couldn’t find a publisher. I felt lost in every part of my being, convinced that the only way to get ahead was to write, write, write.

     I started on another novel. Half way through, I put it down. The problem, I decided, was that I was writing because I wanted to publish again rather than because I thought I had something to say. What I needed was to step back, think about something that mattered to me and do it. If that meant never publishing again, so be it.

     I already had an idea what mattered to me. I also knew that it had nothing to do with novel writing.

     I live in northern Westchester County, NY, a lush, wooded region about forty miles north of New York City. It’s an area where great wealth and great need exist side by side. In the 1990s, Latin Americans, many of them undocumented, began to settle in the area. They mowed the lawns, cleaned the houses and bussed the restaurant tables of the more affluent in the county. At the train station, I often saw them huddled on cold winter mornings, rubbing their hands together to stay warm while they waited for contractors to drive by and offer them work.

     As the daughter of immigrants (my father was from Russia, my mother was born and raised in England), I admired their grit and resilience. I knew from watching my parents that it took a lot of guts to make it in a strange land. There was one big difference however: my parents were able to acquire the legal status that allowed them to work their way into the middle class, further their educations and eventually own their own home. The people I saw would never get that chance, no matter how hard they worked because of their undocumented status.

     I’m not political, but I felt moved by their situation. I began volunteering at a local outreach center that provided English lessons and other services to new immigrants. I got to know some of the people and began to hear their heart-rending accounts of near-death journeys and tearful family separations. The writer in me began to wonder: was there some way to share their stories so that others in the community could be as inspired as I was by them?

     I contacted several local Hispanic organizations and suddenly found myself talking to people who, in many cases, had never shared their stories with anyone before. I interviewed almost twenty people—men and women of all ages from countries throughout Latin America. I began the project in the hopes that the people I interviewed would eventually be able to step out of the shadows. But our immigration policies have shifted very little in the past two decades. My subjects’ stories could not be told without exposing them to undue risk. The project ground to a halt. Once again, I felt the sting of disappointment and defeat.

     Months went by and still I couldn’t get their stories out of my mind. These people had risked so much to share them with me. I knew I had to find a way to keep them alive. And suddenly, after saying I’d probably never write another novel again, I knew I had to. It was the only way to tell their stories. I took what I knew and loved about writing mysteries and married it to something I cared about deeply. And Land of Careful Shadows was born. I hope readers love the twists and turns that come with every good mystery novel. But I hope too, that they come away with a sense of the real people behind it.

First, kill all the adverbs...

I wrote this a while back for Backspace.com. Figured I'd post it here too. Hope it helps quell the nerves of writers facing their first draft of a new book:  

                                      First-Draft Terror

(Alternately titled: "First, kill all the  adverbs...")

     I recently started the first draft of a new novel. This instills in me all the self-confidence of two virgins in a MINI Cooper. I’m sweaty and awkward. I don’t have a clue where anything goes. And I’m already questioning my choice of vehicle.

      First drafts are scary. There’s so much expectation—and so much disappointment. Scenes lumber off in the wrong direction. The writing feels clumsy and artless. The story confuses. Or worse, it bores. I compare the well-dressed prose of authors I admire and cringe at my own naked and brutish words.

     And I want to hit “delete.”

     It’s easy to lose faith. I should know: my first attempt at a novel still sits—half-finished—in my file cabinet. I’ve since published three novels. Yet I have never been able to summon the courage to go back to that manuscript.

     I know a lot more about writing first drafts than I did then but I still struggle on every page. Through trial and error, I’ve found a few things that have helped me get over the rough spots:

1.Write a book the same way you would enter a relationship

     You and your characters are going to be together for a long, long time. (If it’s a series as my first three novels were, it could end up lasting longer than many marriages). You’ll probably end up dreaming about your characters, driving around with them—and yes, even showering with them. So it’s worth spending a few weeks getting to know them before you commit to a long-term relationship. If you have to dump somebody, it’s a lot easier to do it before they’ve taken up residence in your novel (or your apartment, for that matter).

     I was a journalist before I became a novelist and I would never have considered writing a profile of someone before I followed them around for several days and asked a lot of annoying and deeply personal questions. Why should fictional characters be any different? At least a third of my own dilemmas in first drafts spring up because I’m not quite sure what a character would do in a given situation.

2. Loose lips sink manuscripts

     Try not to talk about your ideas until you’ve finished a first draft. Ideas are fragile and tenuous at this stage. Even well meaning friends and family members can sink them with off-handed comments (“I saw that same idea in a movie last year”) or unsolicited advice (You know what you should write about…”)

     The only thing worse than having friends hate your idea is having them love it. Remember, they don’t love what you’ve written; they love what they think you are about to write. In other words, you’ve just gone from being the architect of your manuscript to the contractor—building to someone else’s specifications. Let them react to what you’ve written, not to what you intend to write.

3. Tread softly into the black hole of “research”

     It is so deliciously tempting to Google some minor point in a first draft and two hours later find that you have read three articles and four Wikipedia entries on stuff that will never find its way into your book. Internet research can gobble up your time in unproductive ways. So can answering mail. And writing your blog. If you have to do them, tack them on when you are just about ready to close down for the day. Never kid yourself into thinking that you’ve worked on your book when all you’ve done is Google whether the Kardashian sisters have had plastic surgery.

 4. Write like you’re going to train your dog on it

     I like to trick my inner editor when I start a new novel. I tell my inner editor I’m not writing a book at all. I’m just “playing around.” It doesn’t matter if it’s bad because it’s not “for real.”

     To keep up the ruse, I don’t begin novels when I have three hours to write. I begin when I have twenty minutes (this applies whenever I get stuck on a first draft as well.) I try to write as much as I can in that time frame without reading it.

      I don’t create a new word document. I write on an existing one. Or better yet, an index card or the back of a flyer advertising $50 off plumbing services (all the better to dispose of).

     Of course, this presumes you can distinguish your “bad” work from your “good.” But perhaps not. I had an art teacher at Northwestern University named George Cohen who once instructed every student to paint the “best” painting he or she could create. In the next class, Cohen asked every student to paint the “worst” painting. Then Cohen papered the room with all of our artwork and asked students to vote on the best pieces. About 75 percent of the pieces voted as “best” were the ones we had painted as our “worsts.” So this is another argument for not concentrating too much on the quality of your work: you may be a bad judge of it anyway.

5.Remember that all problems are fixable—just not in the first draft

     How many times have you read a book and said, “there’s no way the protagonist can get out of this mess.” And then he or she does. Sometimes, the writer comes up with a very clever solution (I hate those writers). Most times, the solutions are more prosaic. But they help to remind me that when I feel that my manuscript’s problems are intractable, they aren’t. I just haven’t figured out the solution yet. It always comes—but usually not in the first draft. That’s why I need to finish the first draft. I will never get it right until I first get it down.

     Above all, have faith in yourself. You started this. You can finish it. Don’t worry about what comes in between. To build a smooth road, you always have to start with a pile of rocks.

                                             *****************

Hi everyone,

    For a while I was doing these 1,000-word blogs. And then I realized that was a 1,000 words I could be putting onto my next novel.

    So now I do short, sweet tweets EVERY SINGLE WEEKDAY. That seems to work better for most people.

    If I have something REALLY WORTHWHILE to say and it's worth your time to read 1,000 words, I will post here. But if not, please visit:

        https://twitter.com/suzannechazin

 There, you can get a dose of inspiration every weekday (all the value with none of the fat). Or find the same posts on my professional facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Suzanne-Chazin/310628139068684

     It's called "Word Caffeine," and here is the new announcement for it I just had printed up:

Why Writers Aren't Airline Pilots