Years ago, I used to blog every day, or nearly every day. Now, I’m lucky to write a blog post once a month, and when I do, it’s not for writing practice or to share what happened during my day or to teach a life lesson or to amuse my kids. It’s to promote an…

January represents many things to me, only one of which is a restart button of sorts. But during the cold winter months, I have real trouble restarting. So why choose January as a time to restart anything? I’m asking myself that these days as I surface from a cold. The virus didn’t effect me too…

This post was supposed to be my “New Words for the New Year 8” post, but a cold has me on my bum, and I’m not feeling up to writing anything regarding what my outlook for 2023 will be. That might change in a few days, so if you’re interested in what I might be…

My birthday has come and gone, and here I am, another year older. But am I wiser? That’s a question I like to ask myself. I’m not sure I have an answer though. Of course for me, the answers never come quickly—my mind doesn’t work that way. Even when I taught every day—a subject I…

On Wednesday, October 22, 2008, I decided to take over what had been, at that time, my husband’s blog. Tim is a fabulous and gifted writer, but he’s not a consistent writer. And in those days, my plan was to “update a blog once a week so that [our] little ‘buckets of sunshine’ [could] be…

Literary journals uphold standards by following a style guide. Literary Mama uses The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) as its guide, though we do have our own in-house style guide for a few items. One of the standards we follow is to italicize book titles. That choice might seem inconsequential to you, but to someone…

Grocery stores and the people inside don’t know how special they are to me. Honestly. My experiences at grocery stores are legendary! Okay, well, not legendary, but one encounter led to a moment of human connection and another to a novel. And those are just the moments I wrote about. But as my family will…