Sitting around and waiting for your muse is not the best choice.
I can be a little OCD when it comes to my writing.
I am such a Pacific Northwest girl.
A romance novel focuses exclusively on two people falling in love. It can’t be about a woman caring for her aging mother or something like that. It can have that element, but it has to be primarily about the male-female relationship.
I prefer to scare myself in the ordinary ways, Daddy. Like letting my children cross the country for college. Why bungee jump when you can put a kindergartener on a school bus? Now, that’s real terror.
Whenever I write about motherhood – and I write about it a lot – I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.
Their friendship was more important than any relationship. Guys would come and go; girlfriends were forever.
When you’re a mom, you learn about fear. You’re always afraid. Always. About everything from cupboard doors to kidnappers to weather.
She is like a child picking at a scab, unable to stop herself even though she knows it will hurt.
To lose love is a terrible thing. But to turn away from it is unbearable. Will you spend the rest of your life replaying it in your head? Wondering if you walked away too soon or too easily? Or if you’ll ever love anyone that deeply again?
I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.
We women. as glue for the family. lead lives that are important and conflicted. What we women choose to give up for our families is important and valid.
She’d been criticized for holding the reins of parenthood too tightly, of controlling her children too completely, but she didn’t know how to let go. From the moment she’d first decided to become a mother, it had been an epic battle.
No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother.
It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.
She used to tell me that she couldn’t feel the sunlight anymore, not even when she was standing in it, not even when it was hot on her cheeks.
If she wasn’t careful, she’d slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.
And no one drank just one shot of tequila.
This is the problem with forever friends. They know too much.
Promises were a lot like impressions. The second one didn’t count for much.