A few days ago I woke to a muted orange sun, shining sluggishly through layers of haze. This wasn’t the orange of sunrise—the subdued light lasted well into the day—and it wasn’t caused by the clouds of a late-season desert thunderstorm, either. It was wildfire smoke. Again. It’s been more than a month since Tucson’s […]
After a stop in Phoenix for YAllapalooza, I’m on my way to climes eastern and cold. Lnhammer and the tuxedo kitty gang are holding down the fort for the duration. The northeast is rather cold this week, isn’t it? One thing about traveling (and even not-traveling) is, you stumble upon fragments of other people’s stories.
I’m phobic about heights. Specifically, heights with steep surfaces and/or drops to both sides. (One could argue what I’m really scared of is not heights, but falling.) So walking out under this arch, with drops to both sides and nothing remotely resembling a safe direction in which to fall, took a bit of courage for
This is me being brave Read More »
On The Civilizing Power of Disaster: “Researchers in disaster science have again and again debunked the idea that catastrophe causes social breakdown and releases the ugliest parts of human nature. Research from the past several decades demonstrates, as one report put it, “that panic is not a problem in disasters; that rather than helplessly awaiting
Post-apocalyptic writers take note Read More »
So Oregon, which I’d never visited before, was lovely, and the Oregon coast especially so. Forest and ocean and sand dunes! All together, and not separated into the three distinct landscapes I’d previously thought of them as. In the Central Coast we twice hiked through the pines and sand of Oregon Sand Dunes Recreation Area
My new geographic crush and other things Read More »
Had a lovely time just outside of Omaha, in Mahoney State Park, talking about sense of place and writing processes and the many different paths we follow to tell stories and to sell them with Nebraska’s SCBWI chapter — and akamarykate (who is as terrific to talk to in person as online), and twitter guru
Two days ago, walking through Tucson, I got my first whiff of citrus blossoms–that heady, over-perfumed scent so strong it almost seems artificial. Spring!Yesterday, driving through Omaha with akamarykate, the brown hillsides had their first green, though the deciduous trees are still bare.Last night, just before bed, I looked out my hotel window and saw
Been behind on blog updates as I travel (snowscapes and bare trees, ice coating snow, steampunk trains racing through tunnels, a city turned to a snow globe), but here’s something lovely: asakiyume and I waved to each other as my train from NYC to Vermont passed by.It was about halfway through the journey. I was
After leaving the Gila Wilderness, we made a stop in Santa Fe and then headed on into Colorado toward Vail and Sirens.Vail itself is in a part of the rockies that’s all about the sharp, tall mountains, the scattered gold aspens on their brown slopes already past peak. Everywhere there was a feeling of largeness,
And on into the Colorado Rockies Read More »