writing

November Inspired

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The last two weeks in October were filled with reading, reassessing and writing my own book, working through my publishing list and writing challenges as they came up. I gave myself a gift – two days, creating my own twenty-four hour or so writing retreat. A cheap (clean and comfortable FTW) hotel with a free mini-breakfast (waffles!), two lectures at the St. Kateri Shrine over Indigenous Peoples’ Weekend, and time to simply sit in quiet with my pen and my notebook, with time to plan and think and reset and when it was over, the time to take what I received in all that time, and use that inspiration to move forward into the fall and to plan my writing intentions for the winter.

I did also finish reading seven books in October; multiple genres; fiction, non-fiction; books with groups, books as research for my own book; I even went to a book talk and signing that I thought had nothing to do with my own writing, and still there were some nuggets that have stayed with  me and continue to germinate and take root.

And then Halloween snuck up on us! Out of the blue, and before we knew it , it was here! I didn’t have a costume or any idea of what costume to wear. It was a real struggle; I always dress up for Halloween. This year was the longest I went without knowing what I’d dress as. It wasn’t until I woke up on Halloween morning that it finally came to me, almost fully formed. I could have kicked myself realizing how simple it would be to put together, even on such very short notice.

I’ve been reading The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhon and I finished it rather quickly on Halloween. I will come back to that.

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Penny Prompts – Book Places

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Have you ever traveled to a place found in a book you read?

In the past, I’ve gone to a castle that featured prominently in Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman.

More recently, over my summer vacation, I traveled to Three Pines from the Louise Penny books. I saw the bistro/cafe they set up in the lower part of LacBrome Books and the Haskell Free Library and Opera House (photos below).

Write about a book place you visited or that you want to visit!

Three Pines Cafe, Knowlton, Quebec. (c)2026
The view from the Three Pines Cafe, Knowlton, Quebec. (c)2026
Haskell Free Library and Opera House, Stanstead, Quebec. (c)2026
The border at the Haskell Library between Stanstead, Quebec in Canada and Derby, Vermont in the United States. (c)2026

Penny Prompts – Anticipation

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Well, today’s the day! Louise Penny’s new book, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost has been released! It’s a week earlier than what was on my calendar, so I’ve been holding my breath since last night waiting for the opportunity to download it to my Kindle.

Is there anything that you’ve waited what seemed like a very long time for, and then when it finally happened….

What?

Tell us what happened when the anticipation reached a fever pitch and the moment arrived!

Minotaur Books. (c)2026

Penny Prompts – The Village Green

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For the last several weeks, Minotaur Books has been emailing a special series of thoughts on the gardens of Three Pines. Today is the last one, The Village Green, and I thought I’d share it with you as part of this week’s Penny Prompts.

I have also just discovered that Louise Penny’s newest Armand Gamache book, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost comes out next Tuesday, October 20th! I thought it wouldn’t be out until a week later, so I am very excited, and will now spend the rest of this week finishing the books I’m currently in the middle of!

Prompt:
Write about your garden or any of the gardens in Three Pines or around your neighborhood. Include your sketchbook to doodle the flowers you see and like.

Despite the book coming out a week earlier than I anticipated, I will continue with Penny Prompts through the rest of this month.

Happy Writing and Happy Reading!

Friday Food – Writing Retreat

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One of my rituals when I’m on writing retreat is to take a photo of the first breakfast oatmeal of the retreat. I don’t always publish it, but it’s nearly always there in my phone’s memory. In addition to the taste and variety of the food, there is the wonderful blessing of not having to plan it or cook it or clean it up. It takes some of the stress out of the weekend.

Last weekend’s writing retreat, or was it two weekends ago, left me with inspiration as well as the dread of reevaluating my checklists and my outlines and my path forward. However, the food can still inspire even when the planned inspiration hangs like dew over the morning grass.

Added to my hot, comfortable oatmeal is butter, brown sugar, and dried cranberries. A very simple combination that always says retreat to me, and gets me in the right mindset for a writing weekend.

My tea this weekend was PG Tips. It is a good writing tea.

The flowers were not for eating, but we enjoyed them with our meals nonetheless.

(c)2026

Penny Prompts – Age is a Number

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In celebration of the upcoming release, at the end of this month, of Louise Penny’s newest Armand Gamache mystery book, Mrs. Wolcott’s Ghost, I invite you to join me each Wednesday from now until October 27th for special writing prompts I’ve devised using excerpts from her books.

While on our summer holiday, we stopped for tea at the Three Pines Cafe, which may have been the impetus for doing this series now.

(c)2026

“…wiped the condensation off the bathroom mirror and a man in his late fifties appeared…”
 
“Though it happened each and every morning, the face that looked back could still surprise him. Away from any reflection, he was in his early forties. But each morning he was reminded that was not actually true.”

Armand Gamache, The Black Wolf by Louise Penny

I think many of us have had this same moment that Armand is feeling when something comes up that we are no longer able to do or look into the mirror accidentally and wonder who that is looking back at us.

At a conference, and I may have written about this before, I was asked my age, and I replied, “38.” Friends, I was 48, and it took me a full ten minutes or more to realize that. Even now, more than a decade later, I still think I’m 38 give or take a few years.

Today’s prompt is:

How old do  you feel? If you could go back to any age in your past (or perhaps a future age), what is it about that age that makes it a happy time for you? What are things you did then that you don’t do now (for whatever reason) that you would like to do again? What about things you did that you don’t necessarily regret, but what would you have thought twice about or not done with the wisdom you now have?

Jane Yolen (1939-2026)

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Jane Yolen has died. In my recent writing classes I always shared a handout on creativity by Jane Yolen. The way I found out that she died was on Threads from the granddaughter of Owl Moon illustrator John Schoenherr in a beautiful tribute that included some of her memories of the book. It was so sad and yet a beautiful way to have discovered this loss that affects not only the book world but the entire world.

The author of over 400 books in many different genres, Jane will be deeply missed.

Jane Yolen’s website

Write every day. You don’t have to write about anything specific, but you should exercise your writing muscle constantly.

Jane Yolen’s For Writers

I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy

Anne Frank

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I grew up in a Jewish household in a Jewish neighborhood visiting grandmothers and cousins and observing holidays with the typical complaints of a child with too much energy to sit still and do nothing while the parents were at temple. We were often told to quiet it down while all of the kids were doing their best (or not so best) in the temple parking lot. I can still feel the heat on my face that came up from the asphalt even on these early fall days. These were my formative years. I lived this way in Queens, New York until I was ten, almost eleven when we moved to Long Island, which was different as night was to day.

While we moved east, my cousins moved south to Florida, and while we wrote often, we were bereft [th] of each other’s company which had been constant practically since I was born. My grandmother was their aunt, and my Bubbe (great-grandmother) was their grandmother. My new neighborhood was more diverse than Bayside’s Oakland Gardens, although our immediate neighbor was Jewish and he had a mixed accent of Eastern European and the Yiddish language. We traveled into Queens to see my grandmother, and into the Bronx to visit my uncle.

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100 Days…And Going

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Yesterday was the hundredth day of my 100-Day Project. That would presume that I have completed one hundred prompts. Well…

Overall, I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and would highly recommend Suleika Jaouad’s book, The Book Of Alchemy: A Creative Practice For an Inspired Life. The essays she wrote and the ones she shared range from the funny, tales of life to the poignant heartbreaking twists and turns of life. Some resonated and some did not as all things in life can do. Some prompts were more difficult than others. I don’t recall which one, but I believe there was one that I completely noped out of, and went in a different direction. I laughed, I cried, and each prompt made me think and feel and wonder.

Today, I am on prompt 94 so I am nearly done with the book and I have decided to take two days with these last ten. I want the book to continue on. Last weekend, I was on a writing retreat with my wonderful writing group, and so my concentration was on that writing and reading, plotting and planning. I felt no guilt at all. Once Monday arrived, I got back in the flow of Alchemy.

The most recent one was a prompt about enchanted places and what makes them enchanted. There’s more to it than that, but that’s what I took away. I set that one aside on Friday, and went to one of my enchanted places: The Kateri Shrine in Fonda, New York. I spent about an hour there walking around, photographing flowers and chapels, signs and statues, and yes, writing. There was one picnic table with benches there and I sat there with my kindle and my keyboard and got out just over nine hundred words. There will be edits and additions.

After about day twenty, I made a plan to return to the prompts, and that is my plan for the summer between writing my book and keeping my deadlines, publishing on my website, and perhaps a Substack or two.
When all one hundred are completed sometime in the next week or so, I will read the end pages of the book, the contributors notes and bios, and then I plan to go back to what I’ve written and add, edit, flesh out the ones that have somewhere else to go. After all, that is what being a writer is: writing, writing, writing.

For the most part, I wrote my responses to the prompts on the same day I read them. I kept track of the subjects, categories, and word counts, although sometimes I feel as though word counts are arbitrary. I am stretching these last few out, savoring them. Even though I plan to go back to the ones written since the beginning of the project, there is nothing like doing something for the first time.

On some I added thoughts and paragraphs to the writing. Sometimes, I included ideas that were floating around formlessly in my head. Each prompt had so much potential, and it really is a wonder how many different ideas and inspirations I could get from one prompt. It’s glorious to see what others come up with from the same prompt as well.

Tangentially related, in the memoir class I’ve been taking this season, a book was recommended to me that I’ve begun, and it has given me the framework for my next book once St. Kateri’s Shrines (not the actual title) is completed. I had been struggling with that subject and how to approach it for years, and so seeing this one random inspiration is a gift to myself.

And now, on to prompt #94!