I have been long absent from these boards. In my last post, I told of working on a novel, "A Good Plague." It has occupied the better part of my time for more than a year. The manuscript has taken some dizzying turns. After a particularly intense period of working on it almost non-stop for 48 hours, taking out some 15,000 words, totally rewriting the opening chapter, and writing about 10,000 new words, I fell asleep. When I awakened, I opened the file and started working again, so intent on… Continue

One sultry New Orleans afternoon when I was a young, impressionable and still quite innocent girl of eleven, I stumbled upon a ragged copy of William Faulkner's Sanctuary in a dim corner of the New Orleans Public library. A quick glance convinced me this was not something the prissy librarian would allow little me to take home to mom and dad; I spied the word "bastard" on the bottom of page nine, and the same character said the same word four more times on page ten.



I tucked the book… Continue