My kids tricked me earlier this month into buying the Halloween candy before it was too late, and now almost none is left.

I’m noticing an unprecedented level of undergraduate use of fragments and run-on sentences, not to mention the near disappearance of commas in their writing.

I set out to be a writer—no one warned me I’d also become a birder.

So Nabokov wrote once to his editor saying: "I hate teaching. I hate teaching." As a writer, I actually love teaching. It's grading that annoys me.

"Whichever one there is, is both" --Ernest Hemingway, [For Whom the Bell Tolls]

My 100 word micro essay on parenting, Florida and an uninvited guest. Thanks @fiveminutelit.bsky.social for giving it a home

Five Minutes@fiveminutelit.bsky.social · 2y ago

Four upper teeth, three lower, You bounce, smiling, leaning on the red Arabian armrest passed down from three families. —"Florida Kids" by @timajamal.bsky.social https://www.fiveminutelit.com/florida-kids

"Don't you think Hemingway is overrated?" she asked me. "Of course not," I replied, sharing highlighted quotes from For Whom the Bell Tolls and explaining how no one captured ordinary life and the human condition quite like Hemingway. I wonder if she has Sam Austen's Meow on her coffee table

I'm the kind of person who pays extra for overnight delivery just to get a Moleskine daily planner.

"When your hope shrinks you might feel the hope of someone far away lifting you up. Hope is the thing ... Hope was always the thing! What else did we give each other from such distances?" _Naomi Shihab Nye, "Every day as a wide field, every page"

My best short stories are the ones whose titles emerge only after finishing the whole story.

Lights out. I sip cold water and the neighbor sings in the dark.

Writing is the only thing that fills me up.

AI agents are so fu*** up. They fail to pretend that I'm talking to a real person

I suck at writing outlines. My published essays and stories all came on the spot, out of a deep place, and never from bullet points, but as the book I'm writing now is rolling into its third year, I can finally say that I spent the entire week squeezing an outline, and it looks awesome.

I think I'll stop writing negative stories. Every time I write one, something terrible happens to me in real life

The best comment I received this year is from my 10 yo daughter who just said to me as I was about to start my daily workout: "Mom, I think you started having abs."