Shannon

We live on an island–Orcas Island, in the San Juans, in farthest western Washington State–and there are lots of lovely woods here. I’ve written before about how much I love walking in the woods, how I walk nearly every day up the country road outside our house, to pick up the mail, or just to […]

Happy New Year! Oh my goodness, happy new year 2021, sheesh. I am not much of a blogger (to say the least…), but every year, I compile and publish a list of the books I read over the past year. I keep track of them in a spreadsheet but don’t tally it up till New

Happy New Year! I love keeping track of things. Every year I record all the books I read in a giant Excel spreadsheet, but I don’t tally it up until New Year’s Day–and because the spreadsheet is cumulative, I don’t even have a clue what the total might be. I was pretty sure this past

Originally published at Medium.com. *   A few years back, when I lived in Portland, Oregon, a friend in Seattle was moving and had a bunch of garden stuff she wanted to get rid of. I had recently bought my house and desperately needed garden stuff. So I drove my old beater Subaru to Seattle

Thursday Notes: #26 A Missive from the Edge of the Map Greetings loyal readers! When I changed this newsletter from “weekly” to “periodically”, I didn’t mean to drop it altogether…yet weeks and weeks have gone by. My apologies. (I know you missed me. Of course you did. No need to tell me otherwise.) 🙂 I’ve

Thursday Notes: #25 Less Weekly, More Occasionally Thursday again already?! My goodness. If you’ll recall, I began this exercise last year, in an attempt to bring some discipline and regularity to my writing, and as a kinda-sorta replacement for what used to be my daily blogging. It’s gone very well, I think: I am sending

Thursday Notes: #24 Writing Regularly The thing about writing every day, or nearly every day: it begets more writing. I knew this–we all knew this–and yet…it’s always a revelation to see it happen. I’m working on a long fiction project at the moment, and I’m also still doing these Medium articles, which continue to be

Thursday Notes: #23 Going Viral…??? I wrote you last week about how much fun I’m having with Medium, and the fact that one of my stories was doing pretty well there. WELL THEN THIS HAPPENED. [screenshot of an email from Medium saying they’re going to “feature” the Trophy Wife article] OH MY GOODNESS you guys.

Thursday Notes: #22 No Pictures Good afternoon! Just a brief note today–I’m still digging out from under all the stuff that didn’t get done while we saw friends and family, and ate cookies, pretty much nonstop for the last several weeks. It was a really nice holiday season, though I’m glad to be getting back

Thursday Notes: #21 2018’s Last Thursday Surprise! Well, I’m surprised, anyway; I’d been sure I was going to take this week off from newsletter-sending. But here I am! Mostly because I wanted to tell you about the new fun thing I’m doing: little personal essays on Medium. Here [in the original newsletter, not here, my