rambling

Most of the time, I just eat without thinking too hard about where the food is coming from. I avoid processed foods and work to get fresh fruits and veggies into my body every single day. It’s one of the lasting effects of living in Vietnam, where processed foods were nearly impossible to find and

Sitting side by side in the back of the taxi, we are heading back from Sam Son. I know I don’t have enough money in my purse and already it’s taken several phone calls, undercooked chicken and a sunburn to get us this far. The are exhausted but not asleep. I stare out the window

And that I seem to have in spades. I had, what some might describe as an insane, drive to get us to Vietnam. Twice. And now it’s on for the book. It will get finished. I will have a rough draft done by the end of summer. SheWrites has just announced a new contest for

I was blessed with sunshine and the company of a dear friend this weekend and in the end I came home with four chapter outlines, a narrative arc, a tentative ending and, even, a completed chapter. I got to write about my experience with the fortune teller in Tam Ky. Three years later his predictions

So I’ve spent two days trying to coalesce the major events and themes of my book into a readable synopsis and still I’m so unhappy with it. There are bits that I think are good, but things that I know are not quite right and it’s killing me. There are so many bits and pieces

Writing this book constantly gives me moments to relive and every time that a memory hits me particularly hard, it surprises me. Today I wrote about saying goodbye to a fellow volunteer and more so about having to watch as my daughter suffered the pain of having to say goodbye forever to someone she’d truly

I don’t know what reminded me of them, but for some reason the band This Mortal Coil came to mind today and I couldn’t shake it. I missed their album Filigree and Shadow so much I actually bought it. Then I sat there for the next hour, bathing in it, drowning at times, and wondering

I’ve got six weeks to finish my book if I want to have the draft finished by the time of the writers’ conference. Six weeks. It’s taken me two years to get half done and now I need to get it done. We’ll see what I can accomplish when push comes to shove. Again.