Authors Electric

 I could give you a dozen excuses for my plunge to the bowels of the pits in filing organization. And a few of those alibis might seem understandable. In the move from Seattle to Tucson, I'd left behind my filing cabinets and hadn't been careful enough in boxing personal papers. In Tucson, with a bad knee and limited public transportation, shopping for office replacements had proved to be beyond me. My work schedule and medical appointments got the best of my time management. Etc,  But screw excuses. I ended up with papers stuffed pell-mell in bags and boxes. And I couldn't find a thing. Furthermore, my new WIP demanded extreme organizational skills-- and I was starting to feel like an imposter.  I recalled an old strategy that I called Transfer of Funds-- depositing confidence and power from past accomplishments to areas if weakness. Could it work again for me with the mess that I found myself in?  To start, I bought a dozen cardboard bankers boxes, two dozen hangin...

In this new year, my life's become a war zone waged upon two fronts: 1)  Frantic efforts to pack for the move on August 2  to Tucson, AZ--though I'm recovering painfully from arthroscopic surgery. 2) Speaking of which, I must spend from 7-10 hours a day on rehab, both PT and home recovery. Since I have only until 8/2, when I move, I must make every hour count. So long for now to the old sense of myself as a practicing writer. My WIP, the final entry in the Seattle BOP mystery series, though drafted remains untranscribed. And a new series set in Tucson calls for more time and thought than I can spare. How could this be? I'd prepared for this move for a year. Yet here I sat, three weeks away--still at a loss for advanced tricks in moving orchestration. E.g.: I'll arrive by train on August 4 with several boxes of premium stuff, including an inflatable mattress and a collapsible chair. Assorted boxes will arrive by post while the bulk of my stuff will be delivered by mid-Au...

It's never easy, putting an old love to pasture in order to romp with a new one. In fact, it's often ill-advised and sure to bring on a hailstorm of disapproval and contempt. We may be left with nothing when the new love walks or we wish that s/he would. I knew all this. But, even so, when the Muse whistled to me 'Time to change!' I said so long to my old love: I'd used Moleskine notebooks for many years, in love with their various  thoses :  those durable, finely bound covers...those handy back-end pouches...those premium quality pages... I loved way the Moleskines fit in my coat pocket. And I loved the sense of belonging to a club of writers and artists who'd all been Moleskine lovers. In the course of writing a novel, I'd use one notebook for research and notes, then others for various parts of draft 1. I had no way of knowing my love would ever end. And yet it did on 12/23 when I read Lev Butts' AE blog on last-minute Christmas gift ide...