I just returned from a walk on our local beach here in Totoralillo, rumored to be the best in the region. No, I didn’t have a piña colada, but the fruit sundae booths, churro carts, and ceviche shops are already doing booming business. I didn’t wear flip-flops either, because as you may remember, it’s still…
Many authors keep in mind an avatar or ideal future reader while writing their books. Christian writing podcaster Thomas Umstattd, Jr. suggests directing our stories to a real person rather than an imaginary persona. The apostle Paul was writing for Timothy—one person—when he scribbled the biblical epistles of I and II Timothy. Yet millions of…
My husband’s a World War II buff, and I too value the rich legacy bequeathed by that generation of heroes. Sometimes I wonder how the stories and screens of the past century would have looked different had the dramatic and traumatic events of two world wars never happened. Certainly, both Hollywood filmmakers and New York…
How often do you not finish the books you’ve picked out and started with such diligent intentions? Though a friend tells me I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive that way, it happens more than I’d like to admit. Back when I homeschooled my girls, we learned one day that King Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199) owned a magnificent…
What if I told you all the myths of Chiloé are true…from a certain point of view? A certain point of view? That little phrase—and the echoing question—comes from the original Star Wars Trilogy. You may remember the classic scene from Return of the Jedi where a disillusioned Luke Skywalker accuses Obi-Wan Kenobi of deceiving…
“Voice,” in literary terms, refers to the attitude or personality of the author, narrator, or point-of-view character in a piece of writing. Voice shows up in both fiction and nonfiction. It can be comical, cozy, sophisticated, simple, intellectual, down-to-earth, edgy, monotonous, etc. But what if I lost my voice? I already know what that’s like…
People are hungry. They long for, line up for, and live for a wide variety of things. So before I share my list and theirs, I’ll just ask to get you thinking: What are you pursuing? Notice I didn’t say, What’s worth pursuing? Not yet. In no particular order and with no special attempt to…
My husband and I were hiking along a colorful waterfront street in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, spotting the differences and similarities to Punta Arenas, Chile. That last small city in South America, overlooking the Strait of Magellan, is one of our remaining bucket list trips, but we imagined it couldn’t be more unlike this tropical town…
“You should see the library where I come from,” I tell people here. Hey, I rarely boast about “back home,” but in this one area I’m guilty of horn-blowing about those endless shelves of books and periodicals at the wonderful library in my little Maine hometown. The first time my daddy walked me up the…
Sometime in the past decade, the Sahne Nuss tin pictured above came home with me in a green-and-white shopping bag from our Jumbo supermarket in Santiago. Everybody, myself included, loves classic Sahne Nuss milk-chocolate-and-almond bars, but mostly I fell in love with the image on the lid. It perfectly pictures our life in the Chiloé…
My writing ministry file, labeled 20:24:28, holds almost 400 digital pages right now. The other day, as I finished my blog series on story motifs, I scrolled back to the beginning of the document and discovered some interesting points that I should review more often. In a lot more areas of life, it’s a good…
“Do you believe in destiny?” Nicolás Serrano, up to his elbows in apple mash, asks halfway through my first book Destiny at Dolphin Bay. His friend Melissa has questioned his self-identification as a Chiloé islander, knowing he grew up a city boy. As she watches him make cider in an antique press, she sees him…
