I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks. Every year my family celebrates with great hope the extreme low point of the year at the Winter Solstice—like everyone else, I guess—and then takes the ten days between that and New Year’s Eve as time out of time, that gap in the Gregorian calendar between the Solstice and the New Year it inaugurates. We like to pretend there is no calendar, there is no schedule, there is, in fact, no movement of time. We will also be overhauling this website. . .at any rate, that’s the plan.

This year my husband’s starting his vacation tomorrow, so, hey! We’re making it a party. I expect to spend my days by the fire with my feet up eating chocolate. (Are you listening, sweetheart?) I will, of course, be checking email, so if you’re a client or considering becoming a client, you will still be able to reach me.

But I would not abandon you readers! Oh, no. I would never do that. Because I know that while I’m kicking back in my rocking chair with a cat on my lap, re-reading Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A Family and A Fortune (for that wonderful uncle Dudley and the dry, witty sniping about how the youngest brother Aubrey is “different” that the older brothers use to drive their mother crazy), you will all be hunched over your desks in your freezing garrets type-type-typing away at your beloved fiction, working on your craft, sweating over your plots, living with your characters in that ephemeral otherworld in which fiction writers prefer to live.

So I’m leaving you with three wonderful essays on the craft of writing from Glimmer Train.

Glimmer Train, in case you don’t know, is a couple of sisters in Portland who run a quarterly literary journal of some serious repute. They’ve been doing this for almost twenty years now, and they’ve expanded into online submissions, monthly contests, and a writer’s magazine, Writers Ask.

I hope this tides you over.

Happy holidays! Watch for a new look for the website in the New Year, along with a co-interview with literary agent extraordinaire and author Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, a brand-new Free Edit project like the HOOKS project last fall, and hopefully even a brilliant way to bring back the old posts, which we’ve been mulling over lately. Yes, there is a very real possibility! Stay tuned—

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