Blog

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May by the Numbers

photo by Gratisography

Once upon a time, this blog was just a place to direct potential editors to see a fairly recent example of my writing. If I posted monthly, it seemed like enough. Over time, I built up a few followers anyway (thanks!) and began to enjoy the occasions when something I wrote sparked someone’s interest. As I contemplated the shift to freelancing full-time, I began to research potential income streams and avenues of writerly activity, and discovered a whole world of people who live off their blogs. Some of them are delightful and I read them every day. Many of them are awful, and I can’t imagine how gaming the SEO system to drive unsuspecting browsers to these ugly, ad-laden, content-sparse pages could benefit anyone.

I still think of this blog as a place to explore ideas without an assignment and introduce myself to potential editors, but since quitting my day job, my blog stats have begun to take on a new urgency.

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Bend in the Road

Crooked Road Gemma tattooI named this blog Crooked Road after a line from one of my favorite movies, Joe vs. the Volcano.

It’s been a long time coming here to meet you – a long time, on a crooked road.

The line is delivered while floating on a steamer trunk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s hardly what most people would call a destination. It’s almost the perfect opposite of having ‘arrived.’ Joe and Patricia are floating on that trunk after having been ejected from a sinking volcano – as unexpected a turn of events as one could probably imagine. The scenario certainly qualifies as a sharp bend in a crooked road. The scene is a wonderful illustration of the philosophy that life is a journey we can’t quite plan. As long as it continues, each step of the way is as much a destination as any other.

All this is a convoluted and referential way to announce that against all logic, I have quit my day job. Read More

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Giselle at Pacific Northwest Ballet

Giselle booklet coverGiselle is right up there with Swan Lake when it comes to ballet fame. But I was still surprised when my oldest daughter gasped, “I have to see Giselle; you can take my sister to all the rest of them but I have to see Giselle,” and then proceeded to tell me the entire story. She practically levitated through both acts of the Saturday matinee. So it’s a little bit ironic Giselle was the most challenging piece for me this season.

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Welcome to India

Chennai airport Source TOI Image via The Hindu

Source TOI Image via The Hindu

Before there were blogs, I spent a quarter studying sustainable development in southern India. Many nights involved entertainments of the herbal or alcoholic kind; there were roof-top full-moon parties and midnight swims in the ocean (the garbage floating there was harder to see in the moonlight); some evenings were spent on planting plans and composting-toilet design. But occasionally, I sat down at a computer and wrote about my adventures for an email distribution list of friends. This is one of those stories.

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Book Report: The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning

hitmanIceland has one of the richest literary traditions in the world, and it is a tradition that is alive and well today, as evidenced by several oft-quoted statistics about literacy rate, books read per capita per year, and the highly debated “1 in 10 authorship” claim. Reykjavík is a UNESCO City of Literature – the first non-English speaking city to receive the title. And therein lies the rub.

Almost all of that literary activity is occurring in a language that only a few medievalists and the population of a small, sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic can understand. In such a tiny, saturated market, even record sales are not enough to guarantee a novel’s translation into English, and so most of the world remains unaware of Iceland’s tremendous literary output. Hallgrímur Helgason decided to fix that. He wrote The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning in English, from the point of view of a foreigner arriving in Iceland for the first time and with no preparation.  Read More