So do you love the clip-on tie clipped to a t-shirt? No way was I busting out the dress shirt. Bad enough I had to dust the shoulders of his suitcoat.
He had to do a news report recapping 1976 as a class project and since he was partnered with…a student with a more fluid sense [...]

I’m one of those writers who see scenes from the book I’m working on as film in my head. I can watch it over and over, tweaking and tinkering, until I get it right, and then it’s a matter of finding the time and the right words with which to write it down. For quite [...]

I woke up this morning and hacked through my Google Reader subscriptions with a virtual chainsaw. :villain: I went from over two hundred to thirteen. I thought I’d feel some anxiety or some post-carnage regret but…nope.
Shortly after that my mom called from Maine and she’s going to pop over for the day. [...]

“It Won’t Be Like This For Long” by Darius Rucker. Nice song, but it’s stupendously obvious to me it was written by a man. Why? Here’s the opening:
He didn’t have to wake up
He’d been up all night
Lying there in bed and listening
To his newborn baby cry
He makes a pot of coffee
He splashes water on [...]

I told myself I wasn’t going to blog about the dog for at least a week, but today’s her first birthday and I’ve got nothing else, so…
This was taken the weekend we brought her home, back in May:

While I do miss that Ewok/Wookiee hybrid look, she’s a happier doggy trimmed down, and I’m a happier [...]

You wouldn’t know it around here. The kids are on vacation this week, a vacation I HATE because we don’t ski so we’re just trapped inside in crappy weather. I have an extra kid, too, because my sister’s come to hang out. Plus, the husband decided that, by the time he got the snow cleaned [...]

Interesting place, Facebook. But apparently authors are supposed to have a myspace or Facebook page and, since I’d rather never eat another Dorito in my life than deal with myspace again, I did the Facebook thing.
I’ve been using it a little while and, to be honest, I still don’t get it. Nothing I’ve seen makes [...]

Mini: My ears are bald.
Me: You and the Short Kid keep wrestling around in that fleece blanket. I told you the static would knot up your hair.
Mini: Did you forget the part about my being Chinese royalty?
Me: Of course not, Your Royal Hiney.
Mini: The cats are laughing at me.
Me: At least your [...]

It never fails—as soon as you hand something to somebody to read, you are overwhelmed by the desperate need to change it. I should disappear the kid and make him a returning soldier. Some days writing is nothing more than barely contained madness.
Real life has been kicking my ass for the last ten days or [...]

Shannon Stacey is really just a pseudonym for…

(I set my lapdesk down to run outside for a few minutes and this is how I found her when I came in, looking for all the world like she was arm-chair editing.)