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Writer Seeks Experiences

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The madness and beauty of Old Dehli

If you’ve been reading WU for a few years, you might remember a blog I wrote called Saying No to Say Yes, about my long-held desire to visit India.  Please notice the date, which was November 2015, over three years ago.

I finally made it there in January this year. It took me that long to work up the courage to go by myself, because no one wanted to go with me (one friend just couldn’t make it work). I joined a small group foodie tour, but I made my way there on my own, and spent the first two days alone in my Dehli hotel.

It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. Dehli was a slam to the senses, so insanely different from any place I’ve ever been that I reeled with it at first. On the way from the airport, I practically giggled over seeing cows ambling and tuk tuks putting and dogs trotting and brightly painted buses packed to the gills and women walking along in such ordinary ways, each wearing a sari more beautiful than the last.

Dazzling.

It was wedding season, so the air was filled with firecrackers, and one night in Jaipur we chanced upon a wedding party dancing down the street with a groom on a horse. We feasted on thalis and learned to make proper chai and…oh, so many things.

I wrote to myself on the way there, “I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t know what I’ll find. But I have to do this.”

My personal life has been completely insane with family crisis after family crisis the past three months, and one portion of it exploded the day I was heading to the airport.  Everything was packed and I was taking a walk before calling an Uber when I heard the news.

For a long, painful moment, I wondered if I should stay home. My heart ached with the need to be present for everyone else because that’s who I am, Demeter, the nurturer (in case you never guessed).

But no. I decided, made a conscious choice, to put myself and my hunger first. It was entirely for my imagination, for the girls in the basement, for the fifteen-year-old I once was. I knew the crisis would be ongoing and I would be twelve (and a half) hours opposite my family.

In a way, it might have been a relief to claim a family emergency and stay home. By departure day, I was filled with worries of a million varieties—what if I hated it, what if it was awful, what if I hated everyone on the tour, what if, what if, what if….? [Read more…]

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Winter Rest

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Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the earth is bedding down for a long winter’s nap. The daylight hours are short, shorter, shortest, and the nights are long and cold.  Bears are hibernating deep in their caves. Deciduous trees have shed their leaves. In my garden, all life has fled underground, where energy is being stored for the next season of growth. We humans are meant to bed down, too.  If we follow the wisdom of the earth, we’ll go to bed earlier, sleep a little longer, eat good soups … [Read more...]

Good Company

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(Apologies for being late getting this up!) Two weeks ago, I retreated to Lake Tahoe with a dozen other long-time writers.  It was part retreat in a gorgeous setting (right on the beach, quiet thanks to the low-tourist time of year, mountains, water, even snow), and part business meeting as we wanted to meet to discuss the changes in the business and trade info and try to understand how we each fit into that shifting model.  I came home with a completely edited book, a brain overflowing with … [Read more...]

Boundaries and Burnout

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I have been noticing lately that the word, “work ethic” has been coming up a lot among writers, all of whom seem to be pursuing the vast pots of wealth seemingly just on the other side of a completed manuscript.  No longer do you even need a contract to hit the big time—just look! Every week another superstar explodes out of obscurity onto the top of the e-book charts, then the New York Times.  Every  month, another Horatio Alger, another starlet, another Big E-Publishing story. There are … [Read more...]

The Post Book Crash

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Last month, I finished my new book, How To Bake A Perfect Life, and sent it off to my editor and agent, who are both speedy readers. By the time I polished up a couple of talks for a conference and returned home, they had turned it around, and I plunged into revisions. There’s a fairly tight schedule here (the book is out December 28), complicated by the fact that I’m traveling for nearly all of June, and we had to get everything done before I leave. Over the past week, I’ve noticed that … [Read more...]