I’ve been on the road a lot lately. The road is in my head and the destination was suggested by my great-grandma, Mary J. Patterson. In 1893, at the age of nineteen, she boldly boarded a train in Portland, Oregon, and, without a chaperone, traveled to Chicago...

Writing, as a type of work, can have long stretches of days at the desk and/or hunched over research books, striving to finish a project that you hope someone besides yourself will someday read. Nothing seems to move except your fingers. I was moaning about this to my...

Every family has its legends. The longer these legends are around, the more embellishments they acquire. In my family, there’s a story about something my maternal grandfather did in Prohibition days that involved his mother-in-law (though she never found out about it...

A serious occupational hazard of writing (or any desk job) is a decline in health through inactivity. The issue is getting more attention in the media, now that so many folks spend their days glued to screens. Common wisdom about writing rightly expounds on the...

Eight years ago we moved 300 miles from lush, wet western Washington to arid, agricultural eastern Washington. With us came Ariel, a 12-year-old tortoise shell cat. Had I thought to consult the Character Naming Sourcebook before she was named, I might have chosen...

Being a writer, I have a passion for books. A new book (or, more honestly, several new books) is the one purchase I have a hard time resisting. A while ago my book buying habit got so severe I had to go cold-turkey. For an entire year I didn’t buy one- -not one- -book...