Author: lllama

I want to tell you about my hearts. A few years ago, I found this nifty pattern for knitting little hearts. I was I a business trip and had some time to kill, so I made a few. I often knit on flights, and as I was getting off the plane home, a woman behind… Continue reading Hearts

While I was working on that first chapter, the world stopped. My husband Victor and I had gone to New Orleans to celebrate the anniversary of our leap-day meeting in February 2016. Covid wasn’t a thing when we left Seattle, but right after we got home, the city locked down. Instead of leaving the house… Continue reading I went to a pandemic and all I got was a book

My first assignment was simple: Write out a timeline of events and a description of the various people in my life. Note that I said “simple,” not “easy.” The timeline ended up being around 46,000 words, more than half the eventual length of the book. The list of people wasn’t much shorter, and the whole… Continue reading Just start writing… eventually

“Writing memoir.” I knew it wasn’t the most original Google search I’d ever done, but all I wanted was somewhere to start. The first page of results was full of people wanting to sell me things. On the second, though, a link grabbed my eye: “Write a killer memoir.” That was what I wanted to… Continue reading The first step

For years my life was too chaotic to even think about writing – when you’re bouncing from crisis to crisis so hard that you’ve moved 14 times in six years, it’s hard to focus long enough to write a cover letter for your resume, much less plan and write an entire book. Eventually, my life… Continue reading After chaos, silence