Brain Fog Is Most LIkely a Real Thing

I can’t believe I left my novel’s plot map in the Maine Medical Center. But there it is. Or was.

I have a distinct memory of sticking my notes and plot map into my bag. I knew I wouldn’t be alert for a while (understatement for open-heart surgery), but I thought after a few days I could reread the notes and refresh my brain. I’d done some good imaginary work about how to grow chapters I’d written into the rest of the mystery. I took notes on my ideas. I made a map of the up and down rhythms I hoped to create on the way to the story’s climax.

I thought I could outwit the legendary brain fog that hangs around for a few months after major surgery.

Silly me. Read more >

"You Can't Always Get What You Want," But . . .

If I had to pick a time to avoid open heart surgery like the plague (oops; useless expression these days), I would avoid it now when Maine Medical Center is packed with more Covid patients than any time since the start of the pandemic.

But, as Mick Jagger says, “you can’t always get what you want.” Sigh. (I sang that to my very young daughter when she was asking for the impossible. We always ended up  dancing around the kitchen, so it worked.)

The song goes on to say that sometimes, “you get what you need.” I needed a new aortic valve.

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Suspense. Ice Tea. Duck Babies. Swimming Bears.

This past week, we took our small trailer even further north of Moosehead Lake to camp up on the Penobscot Corridor.

This corridor is part of Maine’s amazing suite of public lands, many with well-cared-for remote campgrounds. No water. No electric hookup. No dump station. And no large rigs with generators that sound like burping-farting monsters that make it hard to concentrate on one’s reading or encouraging wildlife to appear.

First the wildlife: armadas of baby Merganser ducks with a few adult minders (more of that below); all kinds of loons (juveniles without parents gang up together and flap their wings across the water, getting ready to fly; other pairs cry out to discourage great blue herons from coves they favor.) A huge swoop of small, white gulls sipping hatching caddis flies from the air as the insects hatch off water below. A young bear swimming to . . .
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A Good Cry & the Do-It-Yourself MFA

At a library author talk this past week, I was asked how I wrote a novel when I’d only written non-fiction for work.

I said I burst into tears, got up and paced the room, made a mantra of the names of women friends who said I had a voice and should write, repeated that names mantra over and over . . . and I sat back down and started typing. Crying but typing.

But I also told them about my do-it-yourself MFA (Master of Fine Arts). (Still ongoing . . . )

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