First Stories SOLD

I am extremely pleased to announce that I have recently sold two short stories! A friend of mine is starting a company for the production and sales of designer flasks, and he’ll be promoting the hand-painted, etched pieces with creative content. Anything from short fiction to recipes, or so I hear.

            I wrote a few stories and sent them to my friend. His editor picked up one of them for the site and commissioned another piece. I am officially a contributing author for flasking.com, and have been paid for fiction. My dreams are coming true. My stories will appear when the site launches in the next few months – check back for further details!

End-of-Summer Reading

The “Pack Your (Book) Bag” article in TIME Magazine (culture section title page pictured here) got me thinking about end-of-summer reading.






Between the "10 Decidedly Highbrow But Still Beach Appropriate Summer Reads," the New York Times' Fiction Best Seller Lists, the preview pages on Amazon, and a couple of mentor suggestions, I decided to dive into these in the closing weeks of summer.

Joining LinkedIn

After years traversing MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and spurred by receiving three requests from people I respect in the last two months, I finally decided to join LinkedIn. My main concern upon that decision was which picture to post in my profile.

Part of my aversion to joining the site had to do with my own lack of validated feelings about being a writer. What makes a person a writer? Why is the traditional chronological job list so favored, and where do I put the articles that show what I’ve actually done? You can’t put up a profile under “Aspiring Writer” and list the hours you’ve spent creatively toiling, or the number of pages you’ve written but haven’t yet published, or the number of drafts you’ve thrown out.

Now I have a professional profile that, in my opinion, hardly quantifies the work I’ve done, my qualifications, or who I am as a writer. However, I think it is a necessary step, and only the beginning of tracking my career.

I chose black-and-white, at first (more writerly), then scanned others’ photos, which were all in color, and switched to the popular option. Here is the current profile header, and the link to my profile (which, by the way, you will only be able to see fully if you are a member of the site yourself).