I’ve kept personal handwritten journals since I was 15 years old. I’ve lived my life in a creative fever, in the theater as an actor and director, and as a private and sometimes public writer. It’s as if I’ve had…

Last year my sister asked me, “Did you always want to be a writer?” I looked up from my MacAir that morning, sitting at her dining table, stopped typing. I watched her make herself coffee at one of those pod-things…

San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood was gritty, making it affordable for film-related businesses like this tiny, cluttered, windowless audio studio where I watched a guy transfer sound I'd recorded over three years of filming ranchers, cowboys and their families…

She woke up that morning, her head abuzz. Words flying, landed from a dream. Yes, a dream. In fiction, they say, never lead with a dream. Every hack does it to avoid a scene. But this is her real life,…

Flies! Words gathered like them? The prose would not amount to much around here in San Francisco. We seldom see a fly, except in high heat with little wind. Then a few dizzy creatures will circle in the middle of…

Sweet sticky substances, like honey and jam , and that scoop of ice cream falling off your cone and melting in the hot sun…these things attract flies. They gather for a taste of the goodness offered by sugar. The old…

Time for waiting. Agatha looked out the window, craning her head to look south, toward the large rail platform, Anhalter Bahnhof. The clocked ticked. Agatha had released Earnst’s hand only four hours ago as he was called from the railroad…

Waiting? Time for doing. do what you can as long as you can. The woman who taught me how to ride horses handed me a halter - and pointed to a dark bay horse, her horse, "Go put this on…

I wait more patiently now. Which isn’t saying much since I’ve always been very impatient, abrupt even, sometimes crashing into myself, making the wait to accomplish something even longer. I’ve recited Ben Franklin’s little saying many a time: Haste makes…

(Note: I'm using Creative Caffeine to work on a revision of my novel.) “Hear that?” Sarah’s voice pulled me from the deep place I’d been since my head hit the pillow. I’d spent close to 11 hours—every second of daylight…