The world may benefit from my stories...but that's a bit hard to believe, isn't it? Somewhere in my subconscious must be the belief that sharing what comes out of my head is a good and interesting thing. What evidence is there for this grandiose thinking? The rejection letter received today reads: "Thank you so much …
Author: mapelba
I'm a writer, artist, teacher, mother, wife, daughter, friend, coffee addict... What else? A success, a failure, a mess, a fan, a hater of housework, a lover of dogs, a liberal, an obsessive, and a bunch of other things that probably would never occur to me. I reveal myself in more ways in my writings and art than in any list of adjectives. And whoever you are, I hope most of all that you are a reader.
Maybe There Are Ghosts
You may believe in ghosts. I've never seen one. My mother thought she might have seen one--although not on the night she spent in the cemetery. Maybe this is why I'm interested in graveyards. My mother spent the night in one, and how many people can say that about their mother? Now my mother dead, …
Maybe for 31 Days
May begins. Maybe I can't do what I set out to do. Well, what I set out to do is be a published & read author. There are too many factors beyond my control for that. More immediately, I've set out to blog every day and write a short story too. During the month I'll …
Every Damn Day
May is about to fall over and crush me flat. It's good to see the future! Anyway, I will participate in Story-a-Day May, and to add a dash of extra madness (because really, whenever you do anything, a dash of extra madness is good) I'll be trying National Blog Posting Month too! The topic (for …
The Time to Make up Your Mind about People Is Never
Have you heard this line: The time to make up your mind about people is never. I saw The Philadelphia Story in my early teens, and it is still a favorite. This works in real life and in fiction. While there are certain groups that I'd like to label with some lovely satisfying insult--and sometimes …
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The Common Sense Page from My Brain
The ink is my pen is frozen and so are the keys on my keyboard. Really! It's true! Okay. Really, nothing is wrong with the ink or the keyboard. The problem is in my head. One or two of you may know that a while ago an agent asked to see some pages of my …
Be Careful What You Wish For
When I was 8, I asked God to help my dad find a wife. Dad did find a wife. And she proceeded to turn our lives upside down with her madness and cruelty. When I was in high school, I tried to make this deal with God, "I don't care if I can't get a …
The Unreal
Have you seen this documentary? Henry Darger wrote a novel more than 15,000 pages long. He created hundreds of paintings and drawings. No one knew until he was dead. He wasn't a man to go on tour or network. He created his own world and didn't have to care about book signings, fan pages, reviews, …
Hey Blog, You’ll Never Publish in this Industry Again.
Rejection hurts. Sure. No surprise there. But rejection doesn't annoy me. People throwing their cigarette butts on the ground annoy me. Students who don't do any work and then insist on moving up to the next level annoy me. Absurd rules annoy me. And publishing is filled with absurd rules. I understand rules of politeness. …
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You want my name where?
I can't keep up with all the blogs I want to read, but lo, I have found another one to interest me. Author Anne R. Allen suggests in this blog post that a blog should have the author's name in its title. This is a small detail. And not every bit of blogging advice is …
Marta Bacon 