This is just a smile and wave to say that things are going to be pretty quiet around here for the next couple of weeks as I tend to the sweet business of living. Life’s been burgeoning with such glad persistence of late that something’s got to give to make way for it. Thus a…
Very jet-lagged and slightly muddled after an irresistibly impulsive flight to our beloved England and the sheltering hospitality of beloved friends. But oh, so happy and grateful to have been there… It was one golden day after another of early spring sunshine and snowdrops and daffodils, of long talks over guttering candles at the dinner…
I had been planning the menu for well over a month. We’d set the date for a week after our return from a trip to England, and the whole time I was there I was taking notes for the dinner party I wanted to throw for these fellow Anglophile friends of ours at home. Friends…
Made it. Exhausted but happy. A lovely celebration dinner and the sweet taste of a shared victory. She finished. I made my stout word-count goal (literally gasping over the finish line with about an hour-and-a-half to spare). Six weeks of writing frenzy and roughly a third of a first draft under my belt and some…
It was a brilliant but brisk winter day, and I was none too sure I wanted to brave the cold with my clippers and shears. But the calendar would not be denied. For it’s a cardinal rule of gardening here in God’s country that pruning must needs be effected no later and no earlier than…
My writing partner suggested we exchange lists of the things that inspire creativity in our scribbling and the things that hinder it. How do we feed the Muse (or, conversely and tragically, starve her)? I thought it was a gorgeous idea and darted off a silly little list off the top of my head. I…
It’s gone all misty-cold here again in our part of the world, but this past weekend we were blessed with one of the customary miracles of a Southern winter: three days of sunshine and warmth that whispered secrets of April to our hearts. Neighbors came out of hiding in shorts and tee-shirts and songbirds split…
…before diving back into words with a wild abandon. The Challenge is going well. Every day I sit down at my desk and write, pounding out words to meet the day’s quota. Critique, revision, ripping apart and putting back together again will come later (and probably within the bounds of its own ‘challenge’–is it possible…
I’ve made no secret of my heartfelt writerly crush on The Rabbit Room, and it is always an honor and a joy to get to chime in on the Great Conversation that’s going on over there. Most recently I’ve aired some opinions on one of the Inklings, Charles Williams, the man C.S. Lewis called his…
It’s not a New Year’s resolution. Not really, seeing as we made it last summer. More of a debt of honor, an appointment with our laptops. A date (seemingly so far away in the all the bustle and huff of kids out of school and family vacations and launching businesses and whatnot) towards which we…
Twelfth Night has come and gone with a last bright flourish, and today I’ve had my own little personal bonfires of Christmas greens in each of the fireplaces. Down came the garlands of pine and the scarlet jewels of holly, the ivy wreaths and the festal red ribbons. Beloved ornaments have been swaddled in tissue…
It’s been a lovely one, and we’re still keeping it, fondly and heartily. I just wanted to pop in here to wish all of you a very Merry 5th Day of Christmas! Note: Lanier’s Books will be closed for Christmas holidays from December 21st, 2010 through January 6th, 2011. Any orders received during this time…
I wanted to emerge from the piles of holly and cedar and mountains of cookies and candy just to wish you all the very merriest of Christmases. There is so much I would say had I the time to craft it as lovingly as I’d like, but as the moments and the mental powers are…
I had been looking for them for weeks, from the first real shock of cold weather in early November, expecting at any moment to be brought up short in the midst of a day’s round by the sound that is at once the most wistful and the most exhilarating I have heard in nature. To…
Of all my Christmas loves, the books and stories that express the real joys of the season are among the sweetest. Over the years I have amassed a goodly circle of friends that take their indispensable places among the cherished traditions: from the short stories we like to read aloud in the weeks leading up…
little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower. who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as…
The brightest, most blessed season of the year. My heart has been leaning into it for weeks, friends. But the miracle of the first dawning of Advent never ceases to catch me off guard–can it really have come again? The earliest tasks of the season always bear with them a certain tender awe. And always…
Thanksgiving, like any other beloved memorial with which the years are reckoned, has its own certain types, its venerable standard of ‘brightest and best’ against which each year’s observance is weighed. They may all—or most—be cherished in our hearts, a mellow, collected memory of loved rituals and the loved ones that give them meaning. But…
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