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We can learn a lot from birds, persistence being one of them. I love birdhouses and have a half-dozen of them hanging around our property. Some are attached to poles. Some hang from trees. They vary in shape and color. Each year I hope for a cavity nester, such as a chickadee or house finch,…

Guest writer and blogger, Meg Schmidt, weighs in again today on her experience owning an independent bookstore. Welcome back, Meg! Buying a bookstore was an impulsive and imprudent decision. But how could I turn away from the possibility of owning that little shop on the corner, cozy, welcoming, filled with appealing books? A place where…

I did a lot of gardening this weekend. Weeding, mostly, but also “editing.”  Since the last time I’d visited my garden, the plants had tripled in size and now looked like commuters in a subway car at rush hour. The less aggressive ones, like Jacob’s ladder, were being crushed by the robust day lilies and…

In case you’ve been wondering, pixies are green, frog-like creatures with wings. You have to be a witch to see the wings. Seriously Wicked contains all the classic elements of a good commercial novel: a plucky protagonist with a quantifiable goal, friends in peril, an able ally, an antagonist who knows too much, complications aplenty,…

I am a self-professed Cupcake Wars junkie. I love the inventive combinations: applesauce cake with cinnamon goat cheese frosting, double-shot mocha latte with espresso cream filling and chocolate frosting, salted caramel cake with pecan coconut brittle crumble and caramel Swiss buttercream. I would happily devour them all. Each show, for those unfamiliar, begins with four…

Here’s what I like about winter in Vermont: I can curl up, without apology, in the over-sized armchair in front of the fire and read at 4:30 in the afternoon because there’s only darkness beyond the window. Here’s what I don’t like about (this) March in Vermont. It is no longer dark at 4:30; darkness…

Meg Schmidt owned and operated The Corner Book Store in Winsted, Connecticut from 1985-2000. An enthusiastic reader and novice writer, she now resides with her husband in Quechee, Vermont. These are her memories: The book reps arrived in my bookstore in impressive numbers, weighed down by totes and briefcases filled with binders, galleys and catalogues.…

Station Eleven is a complex story. Some assembly is required.  Mandel begins with a death. An actor, Arthur Leander, plays King Lear in an unusual staging of that play: three little girls (who will grow into the king’s quarreling daughters) sit on stage as the curtain rises. Leander falters, flubs a line, flails out a…

The second of two wrens that hatched in the little birdhouse hanging outside my office window finally fledged. I’d listened to their chatter for several weeks, watched mama and papa fly in with morsels of food and back out with the babies’ fecal sacs carefully clutched in their beaks. To avoid revealing the location of…

(This post was originally published on the blog Live to Write, Write to Live.) I tell people it took me between two and fifty years to write my first book, Her Sister’s Shadow. The manuscript itself took two years, but I’d been gathering stories and getting to know my characters (the book was inspired by my mother…