I was talking with a friend the other day about queer literature. The second or third time I used that phrase, she stopped me and asked why I kept using that word — queer. She found it offensive & derogatory. I was surprised, as I’ve begun to use queer for shorthand to mean LGBT, or […]

I’ve just this afternoon finished another book, Playing With Fuego, due out November 2012. It’s the story of Daphne Maddox, a blonde, blue-eyed, monolingual English-speaker who finds herself stuck in Miami. For all she has in common with the locals, she might as well be on the moon. Not that I have any personal experience […]

Every year in November, thousands of writers all over America jump into National Novel Writers Month, known in shorthand as NaNoWriMo. The object is to write like crazy for 30 days straight at a clip of 1,667 words per day to produce a (mostly unreadable) 50K-word novel in just one month. I tried it myself […]

I’m well into my next book, Playing With Fuego. It’s the story of Daphne Maddox, a New Englander who feels like a fish out of water in Miami, where she’s stuck with an underwater mortgage. The glitzy Mari Tirado, a first generation Cuban-American, personifies all the things that irk Daphne about the Magic City. Mari […]

Breaking up is hard to do. I’ve been in love with my website for nearly six years and thought we were building a great life together. But then I started to notice little things. She’d let herself go, not caring anymore that her text wasn’t wrapping, her fonts weren’t formatting, her comments not appearing. She […]