People who haven’t had coffee shouldn’t make coffee. I relearned this important lesson a couple of mornings ago upon finding my pot of coffee spilled like a slick across the counter, dripping over the edge, pooling in a coffee pool on the floor. What had I been thinking? Oh, yeah. I hadn’t. And yet, all of us do things we can’t do in order to figure out how to do them. This living thing is a process, and yet, most folks want to avoid the process altogether because it is so damn time consuming. We want to figure things out without having to figure anything out at all. We want the easy bake way of living and haven’t yet realized that the easy bake cake wasn’t very tasty. To read the rest of MAKE THE COFFEE IF YOU CAN and to comment for a chance to win please click here. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

What has amazed me about the past couple of years is how I have managed to finally gain some perspective on myself and my life. What’s appalling about this observation is that I used to think I had this perspective. I thought that I knew what I was doing and why and how. I thought I had things under control; I imagined I was in charge. I thought I knew what in the heck I was doing. Now, however, I realize that I have and had some behaviors and needs and feelings and thoughts, but I don’t imagine anymore that I have control of it of all. I just sort of “see” myself and know a little more about what I do. I also know that in another 47 years (should I make it that long) I will be able to say the same thing about my current self that I just said about my younger self. Poor thing, I will think. She thought she had it figured out. Click to read the rest of Jessica’s blog and to leave a comment. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

When I was in college, I found myself sitting in the grove of trees by the classroom building with a friend.  We’d just left our class on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Mann, and we weren’t very happy.  How could we have been?  In Ibsen’s Ghosts, Oswald was just crying out for “the sun,” and so were we.  The sun hadn’t been out for a month, the dank Tulle fog all around us like, well, dank Tulle fog. It was there that my friend proceeded to tell me a story that almost made me jump out of my skin.  She must have needed to tell me, letting me into the dark side of her life, a life that maybe had only a window seat of light in it.  I was 22-years-old and hadn’t heard much at that point, sheltered in mostly good ways.  In later years, I tried to write about my reaction to her story in poetry, essay, and short story, until the writer Grace Paley told me that I wasn’t able to write about it because it wasn’t my story. Buy INTIMATE BEINGS “It’s hers to tell,” she said, so I never tried again. And the fact is, by the…

Hello! I’m so glad to be blogging here, and as I was thinking about what to write about today, I thought about change. Writers need to change, even if we think we shouldn’t have to or don’t want to. I went from writing women’s fiction to writing romance to writing nonfiction. As my latest romance INTIMATE BEINGS comes out, I find that I’m writing personal essays. We must adjust to new editors or changes in publishers. We have to consider marketing trends and reader desires. But most people I know hate change. We want things to be the same, for goodness sake! You’d think that buying a new car wouldn’t be that must of a struggle, but it certainly did present some interesting challenges for me, most about my difficulty with change, with what is “new.”About one month ago, I drove out of the MINI dealership lot in my new pepper white, black top, black interior MINI Cooper S. I was lurching a little, still unused to the manual transmission. The last manual I had driven was my former spouse’s 1972 VW camper van—a car I only drove under duress–and that beast is a story in and of it. Let’s…