I’ve been away from my writing blog for too long! My life runs in cycles…so every year Mid-August through early October is about getting new students enrolled in my music school and running the massive Salmon Days concert for our tween and teen rock bands. During this kind of time, my soul passion […]
I went, as a sci fi/fantasy finalist, with no great expectations. I felt honored to be a finalist in the PNWA contest this year, so that was enough; anything else was just icing on that cake. My first conference was a great experience. I met interesting, kind and cool people without trying, got excellent advice, […]
Supernatural is currently my favorite TV show. I am partway through Season 10. The surprise is to me is that Supernatural has never let me down. Sustaining a long TV series with quality and interest is very analogous in my mind to a band producing a long string of excellent CDs. Both seem incredibly difficult to […]
About nine years ago King County came to me as Trails Club Advocate for Cougar Mountain and asked my opinion on whether the new trailhead near Nike Park on Cougar Mountain should be named after Harvey Manning. I thought about it a (brief) moment, and replied that it shouldn’t. Having spent years poring over Harvey’s original trail […]
You may know Harvey Manning from his statue near the Trail Center in Issaquah. You’re more likely to know him as the author of the Footsore and 100 Hikes series of trail guides. I don’t remember when I first heard Manning’s name, but I do remember the first time I met him, by chance outside of City […]
I blogged in May: “On What Authority?” was I offering advice on the craft of writing? Since that blog I got the unexpected news that I am one of eight finalists in PNWA’s 2016 Contest in the science fiction/fantasy/paranormal category. This is a competitive contest for which PNWA overall (in all genres) received over a thousand entries. I mentioned before that […]
A majority of Siana’s War is in first person narrative. When you spend over a decade of your life and thousands of words writing about a character, especially in first person narrative, that character lives in your head all the time. Things that happened to her in your book feel like memories, not scenes out of a […]
When I was 11 or 12 I wrote a brief story about a girl named Eolia. I gave my short story the ponderous Latin name of Advent Ignaritatis. Eolia went in search of marvelous beauties and instead found a lethal kingdom of terrors. As a middle schooler I had a plethora of novel ideas, and […]
Tension Myositis Syndrome. TMS. It’s a term coined by Dr. John Sarno in his books on chronic pain. But anything that ends with “syndrome” is just a description of a thing that exists outside of the label. In this case, calling fibromyalgia TMS is not really saying it isn’t fibromyalgia. It is saying that fibromyalgia […]
When you are fresh out of music college, you imagine teaching in collegiate terms. I’ve had many young teachers who work at my music school, Kaleidoscope, advertise that they teach (say) guitar, songwriting, music theory, composition. The reality is that your entire evening might be six- to ten-year-old students who are beginners. Scales suddenly become […]