Marion Agnew

Not to be all "gratitude list" about it, because nothing is more annoying when you're wound up and in a funk at the same time to be told, "make a gratitude list," but. Okay, this is maybe a little gratitude-y.  September has brought, shall we say, challenges, and in learning to meet them, I have been deliberately looking for bright sides.  * The "active words on a page" part of writing my new novel had to take a back seat in September. In the rest of life, we had problems. They needed solutions. We also had situations--things that existed but over which we had no control and thus couldn't solve. Sorting it all out meant fractured sleep and focus and concentration. That meant few words.  Bright side: the novel was still there. Occasionally I'd stop at my open notebook and write down something, and when I went back to look recently, all of the notes made sense. (!!!) Apparently I was continuing to work on my novel all that time. I'm sitting d...

Writing--for publication, anyway--involves a lot of waiting.* You wait for pitches and finished pieces to be accepted or rejected. You wait to hear from editors. You wait for your words to appear in print/online.  Waiting for the sun to rise. Regular life apparently involves a lot of waiting too--even when you can schedule appointments and aren't hanging around to hear by text or phone (or when you give out your cell number more frequently than we do). I have two appointments still looming this month (one fun, one not so much but worthy), and even though they aren't today's problems, I feel their weight.   Of course, it's possible to do things while you wait.  Yesterday, while waiting, I had a cavity filled and learned how to resize a graphic in Canva. Monday, I watched a knowledgeable expert fix the washing machine. For several previous weeks, I've produced and revised words.  The past couple of weeks have been full of mechanical things. I've asked many other e...

Below are a few of the things I’ve been pondering this August.   New glasses do make a difference in how and what I see, and that changes my outlook. So many things that I think of as metaphors are also literal.   Related: in an article about brain function by Max G. Levy in Wired , I read this astonishing sentence: “ Every thought that crosses your mind has, literally, crossed your mind, as millions of neurons in different parts of the brain chatter with one another. “ Literally. Here's a link to the article:  https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-your-brain-under-anesthesia/   It’s nice to be invited to participate in something professional. Related: It’s interesting (to me) to do a retrospective of my work in a particular form over the past seven or so years. I could see where external events influenced decisions (and I’m glad I made the choices I did), and I could also see where I began to push myself to develop skills I hadn’t had before.  ...