I love getting my Word of the Day from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (you can sign up for it on their website). I’ve discovered so many cool, strange, new words from it and I keep a file of them on my computer. Who knows, one or more of them could end up in my writing. Today’s [...]

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For my birthday Ted got for me this great vintage Pocket Book, Peabody’s Mermaid, by Guy and Constance Jones–and it came today in the mail.  The book, this version of which was published in 1948 (it was also serialized in Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1945!), is a movie tie-in. I think I’ve mentioned it before but [...]

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Reading the book A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher; she’s one of the featured writers at Fishtrap, where I won a fellowship for July so I thought I’d better read her book. It’s won or been nominated for a slew of awards and it turns out I remember this book being reviewed in Entertainment Weekly [...]

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I really shouldn’t have, but I bought this pulp novel on Ebay a week ago and just got it in the mail.–it was just a $1.99. I’m a sucker for these pulps from the 50s/60s–but especially if they’re film tie-ins, like this one: The Best of Everything written by Rona Jaffe. The movie starred Hope [...]

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Heading to Utah tomorrow, but spent Sat. and Sunday in Las Vegas seeing the family. Today I went to the Atomic Testing Museum. Very strange. Very fascinating. In the museum there was a 13 minute movie about the Atomic Bomb and Testing in Nevada. They must have put speakers or something under the floor and [...]

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I’m trying to get caught up on my New Yorkers. Did you read the profile of Ian McEwan from the Feb. 23 issue (which, by the way, had that hilarous and grotesque cover with A Rod)? Daniel Zalewski’s profile of the Atonement author (read it here) is so compelling, so readable, and SO long. I [...]

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Leave it to NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac to put me in such a great mood at the end of a long  week (but productive–wrote fifteen more pages; am now into the 3rd chapter of my novel). Love this poem by Peter Meinke, so funny and strange. We all have a kooky uncle. Mine is my [...]

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Ooof. Long week. But a good one.Started at the second college and also a night class at a writing school downtown. All that and I managed to go to my office and work on my book! This week, amid all of the chaos and driving to and from the schools I got in the mail [...]

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Van Johnson has died (this has been a bad week for classic movie stars!). He was 92. Van Johnson was often described as having “affable charm and boyish good looks.” He was especially good in the MGM musicals of the 1940s, though as a dramatic actor he was often underrated. Here’s Van (and June Allyson–a [...]

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Sadly, Beverly Garland has died. As a kid I had hoped thought she was a long-lost sister of Judy Garland. But, I learned later, she was not. She was a B-Horror Movie Queen, a prolific television actress –the first policewoman on television (some of you younger kids might remember her from Scarecrow and Mrs. King, [...]

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