A lovely reader recently wrote me a letter, said she loved Losing Clementine and asked if I could recommend other authors for her to try. (I never stop being amazed when people write me fan mail. It’s so astounding I can’t help but imagine some other author’s inbox has started rerouting their mail. “For me?…

I almost stole a dog this weekend, and if I had, I wouldn’t have regretted it. Writing requires a lot of sitting and thinking. Trail running requires very little of either of those things, which is why I do it whenever possible. Occasionally, I do it in an organized fashion that requires pinning a number…

I read a story – a collection of paragraphs really – where some very talented writers talked about their pre-writing rituals. It was depressing as hell. Okay, some of them were intentionally funny. But it’s safe to say that we writers, as a species, are bat crap crazy. We have very little idea how to…

I am an artist. My husband is an artist. I don’t need a new reason to like artists. But hells bells, I’ll take this one anyway. And if this moves you, you might want to click here for a little reading on exactly why arts education is critical in public schools, which are dropping classes…

I’m on a permanent quest to find the next amazing book for my TBR (to be read) pile. Yes, it’s too big already, but somehow there’s always room for one more. May I recommend this for your TBR pile? Arcadia is the story of Bit, a young boy who grows up in a flawed if…

If all the attendees of the LA Times Festival of Books got together, there would be enough of us to form a small town. We’d need a grocery store, a post office, a sheriff’s deputy or two and a volunteer fire department. We’d be the most literate, book-crazy town ever, and I would live there…

I spent this evening chatting with the lovely Mary Sasso on her internet radio show, Book Club Girl on Air, and you can listen to it right here. If you couldn’t make it out to one of my events…well, I think this is actually a lot like being at one. Except you don’t even have…

On weekends, I drive an hour out of the big, sprawling city and into a state park. I leave my car and hit the trail in running shoes with a bottle of water lashed around my waist. Most of the world is still asleep, and the sun hasn’t had time to burn off the marine…

Monday, I’ll start work on my next book. It’s not the next book you’re likely to read, of course. Publishing is a long process – almost a year – and the follow-up (although not the sequel) to Losing Clementine has been finished for a couple of months. That book, which is currently titled The Short…