Where's Waldo?

Or more accurately, where's Linda?

Well, I'm finally back in the Pacific Northwest after experiencing two and a half weeks in Europe with my beloved Charming Man!

Throughout the next few days, I'll be posting pictures and descriptions of this fantastic trip. :)

Ah, fresh air.

Amazing what a very brisk walk combined with a goodly amount of sit-ups will do for a writer. I just got a wonderful idea for some necessary back story for Book Two. Yay!

My favorite titles.

I wanted to talk about my favorite books on writing. Every author has her go-to's for inspiration and help, and here are mine.

How can one live without Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing?

People love to denigrate our genre. This book gives an insightful and quirky look at how much and how little attitudes towards women's words have changed. It taught me just what kinds of horrible internalized sexism colored what I wrote, how I viewed other women, and worst of all, what I did to myself.



Making a Literary Life by Elizabeth See.
A far greater writer than I'll ever be says this:

If everyone who wants to be a writer would read this book there would be many more good writers, many more happy writers, and editors would be so overwhelmed by sweetness they would accept many more good books. So what are you waiting for? Read it! Ursula K. Le Guin

Write Away by Elizabeth George.
From Publisher's Weekly:

Here's a useful book for the novice writer battling the fears and insecurities that attend when she contemplates her first novel....George illustrates her points with passages from both her ownworks and those of numerous writers she admires (Martin Cruz Smith,Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris), this remains more of a how-I-do-it book than a how-to-do-it book. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Unlike PW, I'll say that this book is good even for experienced writers. I love her examples - they illustrate her points brilliantly.


I feel that the most important book on my shelf remains Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller. I'm not going to kid you - this is a painful and devastating book, whether you have been a victim of sexual assault or not. But it endlessly reminds me of what I feel is the great gift that romance gives every reader: That her pleasure is central to life, that her consent should never dismissed or belittled, and that each of us deserves to be heard.

A different kind of Give-away.

I'm donating two of my one-of-a-kind, hand-painted fans for the Rose City Romance Writers raffle basket donation to the Emerald City Romance Writers Conference.

The ECRWC is October 1-3 this year. It is one of the best writing conferences on the West Coast and every year, they hold a fund-raising raffle of gorgeous gift baskets.

I hope they like my fans. :)

Branching out a little.

I'm the Wednesday blogger over at the Cascade Literary Agency blog. This week is everyone's introductions.

Not my strength, but I did get to indulge my love of parenthetical statements.

Brain stuff.

Yeah, yeah, we all know I have issues around worrying and over-thinking. I've done lots of good brain work, and I've found ten cognitive fallacies that contribute to my tendencies.


(swiped shamelessly from Feeling Good by David Burns, MD)

1. All-or-nothing thinking aka dichotomous thinking:
A tendency to evaluate things in black & white, absolute categories. Either you get straight A's, or you're a failure. Either the room is spotless, or it is a sty.

2. Overgeneralization:
"You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again....The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization. In its absence, a personal affront is temporarily disappointing, but cannot be seriously disturbing."

3. Mental Filter aka: selective abstraction:
"You pick out a negative detail from a situation, and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative."

4. Disqualifying the positive
For example - how most of us respond to compliments.

5. Jumping to conclusions by
a. Mind Reading and
b. Fortune telling
What, you mean I *can't* read people's minds and foresee the future??? Dammit!

6. Magnification and Minimization aka catastrophic thinking
OH MY GOD!

7. Emotional Reasoning
You feel it, therefore, it must be a fact.

8. Should statements
Motivation via shoulds sucks.

9. Labeling and Mislabeling
"I'm a ____" fill in the blank.

10.Personalization
The Mother of Guilt - you assume responsibility for a negative even when there is no basis for doing so.