Perfectly Useless Concentration

To those who have never written a book, writing the book probably seems like the hardest part of the process. Guess what? It's not! For those who are interested or who might find this helpful, I thought I'd break down the process so far. July 2015: Dreaming This is about the time I started fumbling my answer to the ubiquitous question, "What do you do?" I'd stepped away from my longtime role as executive editor of Round Table Companies, but I hadn't come close to stepping awa

Photo by Adrian Collins Photography Recently, I found myself deep within a writing slump. It starts with winking, conspiratorial denial: you've been working hard, you deserve to take a couple of days off, don't feel bad! Then it goes to self-flagellation: you haven't written in a week, what have you been doing with yourself? Then excuses: well, we had that big trip, it's not as if I was going to work while we were on vacation. Then distraction: oh! A new project? One I'll be

"So what does one wear to a gathering of law enforcement and mental health professionals?" I texted my sister Amanda, only half joking. "Hmm, jeans, a cute top, and heels?" she suggested. "Good call," I said. A few minutes earlier, Officer William Kasberg of the San Antonio Police Department's Mental Health Unit had invited me to attend a presentation he was giving the following morning. "I think it could be a lot of help to you," he said over the phone. "What do you think?"

Photo by Adrian Collins Photography, Yosemite National Park First, let me address the elephant in, at least, my bedroom: It's been four months, almost exactly, since my last post. When I last wrote, I was still sitting on the cozy sheepskin-covered chair in a downstairs corner of the Maine house my mom and I had rented for three weeks. We were a week from returning home, two weeks from a wedding in Mexico, six weeks from Thanksgiving, eight from the Rock and Roll half-maratho

Today marks the start of our last week in Maine, and I'm already feeling nostalgic for a trip that hasn't finished. After next week, Maine won't be a dream or a joke or a myth; it'll be a word wrapped tightly around memories of my mom and I building a closeness that we didn't have before--not to this extent, anyway--and building our books at the same time. And for now, at least, it's the books I want to talk about. It feels weird and vulnerable, this public accountability I'm

Maine has a sort of mythology in my family. "You just have to go to Maine!" I can hear my dad saying back when I was in high school, maybe even younger. "I'm telling you. If you go to Maine, you'll write a bestseller." I don't know where he got that idea. I assume he saw a movie once, long forgotten, in which someone holes up in a cabin surrounded by far-reaching pines, perhaps some water, and thoughtfully composes sentences on a typewriter. "You'll get inspired," my dad says

Yesterday, I went to see my brother on the set of Dead Awake, the indie horror movie he's producing and acting in. A whole hospital wing had been closed off for filming, and Caro--AJ's girlfriend--and I had to wait before a walkie-talkie-brandishing crew member ushered us up the elevator between takes. From there, we were shuffled into a hallway where half a dozen crew members huddled before a small screen, watching the scene that was being filmed ten yards away. "Quiet on se

I'll be honest: Until yesterday, I'd started dreading that question. Not that it was coming from all directions, of course, swarms of eager readers hungry for a progress report. It was usually Adrian, asking casually but interestedly over dinner. Or either of my parents; maybe a friend here and there. In the last few weeks, my responses turned vague: "Oh, it's going," with a laugh, or, rolling my eyes, "You know, still stuck in character development," and if anyone asked what

There was a time in college when I told my mother that if I were dead she'd hear about it, so could she please stop calling all my friends--I was fine, it was finals week, I had told her about this! She'd been calling me for days, and I'd been either missing her calls or ignoring them, frantic and caffeine-high and sleepless as I wrote one long-delayed finals paper after another, hoping they sounded coherent. My mom had resorted to calling my high school friends whose numbers

In romantic relationships, I used to be fond of saying that I needed to feel wanted; I didn't want to feel needed. (We get to say things like that in our twenties, right?) To me, feeling wanted was to feel chosen, special. Feeling needed was to feel pressured, overly responsible for another's happiness. Want suggested will. Need suggested helplessness. I emphatically did not want to be needed. (My understanding of romantic want and need has since changed, but that's a topic f