Shannon

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

Thursday Notes: #20 Blustery Weather and Large Birds and Pet Peeves It’s very windy out here on our little island! So far (fingers tightly crossed) the power has stayed on today, though it’s flickered a lot. Monday we had an outage, just as we were about to make dinner, so we ran off to Rosario

Thursday Notes: #19 Welcome New Subscribers! Lots of signups this week, yay! Feel free to forward this newsletter around to all your friends and encourage them to sign up too. Or even perfect strangers. Or imperfect strangers. I’m not picky. 🙂 Since I last wrote you, we did have our Christmas-tree-decorating party, and it went