I’m on deadline for Penguin/Blue Rider Press and the book is due in less than three months. Do I feel the stress? Sure. Even after six previous novels published by the majors? Oh yeah. But there are four things I’ve learned over my years as a pro writer that instantly help to drop my stress meter by notches: 1) Take ten deep breaths. That’s inhale, and, yes, exhale, too.  Honestly, it sounds too reasonable and basic to mention, but when I’m stressing out, I am not breathing. Not smart. Oxygen helps everything. 2) Slow down to speed up. It’s not …

Today is the day BLOWBACK–a Vanessa Pierson Novel by Valerie Plame and Sarah Lovett–officially becomes available!  We are celebrating this amazing creative collaboration.

Today, for the first time, I held the hardcover of BLOWBACK (Blue Rider Press, Oct 2013), the debut novel in a series of international spy thrillers co-authored with former CIA operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Honestly, my first reaction was a very basic, wow, it’s shiny and beautiful! This has been a long project and Valerie and I are very proud of BLOWBACK–which has already garnered a starred review in Library Journal this month–at the same time we are already at work on the second novel in the series. So the first book/baby is taking her first steps just as I’m falling …

ArtWorks elementary school students heard poet James McGrath read from Dreaming Invisible Voices (Sunstone Press). Then the students were asked to write a poem in the voice of an animal or a part of nature. My daughter chose a cobra. COBRA  (from the ArtWorks Poetry Anthology 2012-2013) By Pearl Mariano I sway at the worldAs it goes byI feel the beats asIt goes around and comes aroundI feel the beat of your angerI am the mirror you look intoIf you are calmI am calmAnd we can sway together Kathleen Nakamura’s 3rd GradeEl Dorado Community SchoolSpecial thanks to James McGrath and …

If you haven’t heard Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Ted” talk on creativity, genius, and showing up for work, listen now.

Snippets from a letter to a creative friend: I understand your desire to actualize your best writing.  You know what?  I want to actualize my best writing, too.  Getting published is really irrelevant when it comes to the issue of always trying to do our best storytelling–to let our characters live honestly and fully on the page, and to do their stories justice.   It is a conundrum, my friend, that desire to be the best we can be creatively. We can only do the best we can do at any given time. We can only aim for emotional truth. …

Quote of the day from Alan Watt,  The 90-Day Novel: “Our job as artists is to build a body of work. When we drop our preconceptions about what good writing is and we give ourselves permission to write poorly, everything changes. Permission to write poorly does not produce poor writing, but its opposite. We become a channel for the story that wants to be told through us. Rather than impressing our reader with our important writing, we can impress with our willingness to be truthful on the page.”

I am just back from straddling two worlds–the fictional realm and what appears to be daily reality. I met a major book deadline on Tuesday. Today is Sunday. I still find myself inhabiting an altered state as I come down from the writer’s most seductive high–total immersion in a ‘living’ creative work–and a fiercely demanding and exhausting work schedule. Over the years, I’ve met my share of deadlines for 5 other published novels and many published nonfiction books. This time, over the course of the project, I thought a lot about pacing, psyching up, intervals, training, recovery–terms often used in …

“Make them earn their victories, because we do not care about characters who are saved. We care about characters who save themselves and each other.”     Holly Lisle, author, writing teacher

In the midst of a creative life and after countless conversations with other Creatives, I’ve come to believe that many people understand very little about their creative process and the creative process in general. Expectations–defined and reinforced by social mores–often have to do with achieving goals based on tangible production. For a writer, that means word counts and page counts. But, really, creative process does not bow to our everyday expectations. Writers often talk about “productive days” versus “next to nothing” days. And our idea of what is productive and what is not…well, our conscious, every day, practical minds usually …