The staked tomato is on the ground. The lemon drop chili plant that was supposed to grow to a max height of 3 ft is now nearing 5 and between me looking at it and thinking “Should I prune this? But it looks healthy..” and doing a look through to check on things after the…… Continue reading Summer 2025
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Poetry, Tish Wonders, and Interesting Reads
Laconic is a favorite word right now. I came across it while reading Whereabouts (Jhumpa Lahiri) in the chapter titled At My Mother’s. The dictionaries say it means to use few words in speaking or writing or the minimum amount of words needed to the affect of sounding mysterious, rude, unfriendly, or casual. “And yet…… Continue reading Poetry, Tish Wonders, and Interesting Reads
Do It Faster with AI, They Say
There’s a Masterclass trailer for their Achieve More With GenAI class that talks about harnessing AI to boost your productivity. Do more. Do it faster. It starts with Allie K. Miller, one of the featured experts, saying “It is now starting my day at like 30 mph, instead of zero.” ??? I don’t know why…… Continue reading Do It Faster with AI, They Say
Discipline
Anyone else prefer their own chaotic (writing) habits instead of ‘disciplined’ ones?
On Editing
Usually, if you keep obsessing over a piece of writing, it gets worse. A word, phrase, punctuation, you can always find something to change, replace or move around. But other than factual or language aspects that are either definitively correct or not, at some point you have to know when to let go. But I…… Continue reading On Editing
Assigned Reading
Books find you when you’re ready to read them, when you need to read them. They just somehow know.
Choose Your Own Adventure
You take the yellow trail-it takes you along a gushing, natural brook, the only one left of its kind. You’ll walk past a pond and under a canopy of cool, green trees. It is a loop and you’ll come back to this place, gauranteed. You take the blue trail-it goes over hills and past a…… Continue reading Choose Your Own Adventure
the self
From the first page of the first chapter of Blue Pastures by Mary Oliver. It’s the first time I’ve ever read her work. I keep coming back to this again and again. Our own self gets in our own way. And we let it. All the damn time. It most definitely is a ‘curious matter’. Of…… Continue reading the self
Writing in new ways
Even though I was still working with facts, and the organizational skills I’d practiced in research reports were extremely useful, I had to adapt to storytelling in historical narratives, to writing about a person rather than a collection of data.
The Secret Lives of Books
Books tend to outlive us. They also tell our stories in addition to the ones printed on their pages.The Family Book of Verse is a lovely hardbound book from 1961, edited by Lewis Gannett. I had read some of the poems before. But one day, as I flipped through it, looking for a short poem…… Continue reading The Secret Lives of Books
Mariam Sultan 