I love Quindlen’s essay in the current issue of Newsweek. It talks about the value of writing in anyone’s life and echoes a chapter in Pen on Fire in which I talk about keeping a journal for your kid or sharing a journal with a significant other. Read Quindlen’s essay here. Moving piece.

Very sweet of my internet friend, Deborah
to send me a bottle of wine to celebrate finishing my novel (from wine.com). Very thoughtful. Thank you, Deborah…

Lovely words, don’t you think?

Well, I finally wrote them on the middle of page 395 of Chapter 30 of Starletta’s Kitchen. Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hold that glass of champagne aloft and toast with me….

Now begins the task I’m actually looking forward to: revision. (I’m also dreading it, too, if that makes sense.) The manuscript needs so very much work, but I’m looking forward to it. Getting the words onto the page–the first draft–is the harder part, for me.

Ann Hood was on the show yesterday. I had been aware of her work for years, but it wasn’t until Pages magazine asked me to review her new novel, The Knitting Circle, that I read her. I loved the book, a story about a range of women with stories. I then picked up her collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life and it knocked me out. The tone of the stories was much more flip, less serious than the novel (based on Hood’s life), and with each story, I grew more and more impressed with her skill and seeming alacrity with which she writes. I want to read more of her stuff–all of her stuff, in fact. We didn’t discuss this on the show, but I believe her book has been optioned by Julia Roberts, a confirmed knitter. Hood is especially great at short story endings. Every writer knows how hard ending a piece is and she does it just right, tying things up a bit, but not too much so as to seem contrived.

Barbara. Last few days, thoughts of Barbara underlie everything. She had such vim and vigor. To the end.

Barbara Seranella
Born April 30, 1956
Died January 21, 2007

Barbara Seranella, 50, bestselling mystery author and resident of Laguna Beach and PGA West in La Quinta, died peacefully on January 21, 2007, at 4:15 p.m. EST (1:15 p.m. PST) at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband Ron Seranella and her brother Dr. Larry Shore at her side. Barbara, who died of end-stage liver disease while awaiting a liver transplant, leaves behind her husband Ron, brothers Larry Shore of San Francisco and David Shore of Woodacre, parents Nate and Margie Shore of La Quinta, and stepdaughters Carrie Seranella and Shannon Howard.

Private funeral arrangements are being made by the family. A celebration of Barbara’s life is being planned for February; details will be announced later.

For information, please contact Debbie Mitsch, Barbara’s publicist, at martinandmitsch@aol.com, (714) 743-6127.

…………

I will miss her greatly. We were in a critique group together for a while. She was on the show a few times. Here’s the podcast of the last show.

And something she published in the Times in December (Thanks, Bill Fitzhugh): Click here.