The blog is moving. You can still find me using www.awriterafoot.com, but if your marker is set to http://awriterafoot.typepad.com/, you will need to change it.
The new base address is: www.barbarasamuel.com/blog
Come check out the new design! I'd love to know what you think.
Really...change your bookmarks and feeds to the new address.
Whew. Flu knocked me flat on my back, but I am happy to say I've returned to the land of the alert and alive. Kind of. I actually wrote pages this morning, so that's a good sign.
For you:
A photo taken a few days ago. These are the elements that make me want to shoot, that quiet light, the fleeting moment.
Now, I'm off to catch an early showing of the The Other Boleyn Girl. Have a happy leap day!
CR considerately shared his flu with me, so I spent my Sunday in my little den down in the basement, curled up with comforter, tea, and one very happy dog, two cats, and plenty of oranges. We watched many, many episodes of Six Feet Under, Season Four.
HB is redesigning the look of the blog. I really loved hers so asked her to give me one like it. We are almost finished. Check back soon.
There is still plenty of room in the Girls in the Basement class. This is very nurturing, creatively freeing course. If you are floundering because of too much external feedback, or a lack of direction, or you simply feel creatively worn out, this is a good way to connect back to your own "girls in the basement," and write more productively and happily.
From the syllabus:
“If you don’t write your books, they might not ever get written.” Madeline l’Engle.
There are a great many how-to-write courses and many great teachers of how to write a novel. This is not one of them. The Care and Feeding of the Girls in the Basement is meant to help inspire and encourage you, to help you learn (or remember) how to nurture your creative spirit. It’s a chance to renew your joy, tap into the original delight you once felt for writing, and make a powerful commitment to yourself and your writing. We’ll draw from several texts, including The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron; Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarrissa Pinkola Estes, and Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, among others.
Class starts March 1, so hurry! Read more about the class here.
In college, I had a deep and abiding crush on my friend Jan. I'd just limped to Pueblo after a disastrous series of reckless adventures. I was twenty two and gawky and a little bruised by life. Jan was few years older, and everything about her was quirky and cool and interesting. She was tall and wore her hair short when everyone else wore theirs long. Her lipstick was bright (as I came of age in the "long and silky" era, I didn't even know how to wear lipstick!) and she drove a Karmann Ghia. Her apartment was on the second floor of an old building in downtown Pueblo, with long windows and wallpaper with cabbage roses and a huge, sunny kitchen where she had pinned postcards and quotes in odd spot. By the sink: "I have too many fantasies to be a housewife."
She was also a mothering sort, and took me under her wing. She cooked for me and invited me to sit in that beautiful kitchen and lay down all the sad stories I was carrying around. She had come from some grimy city just over the river from St.Louis, and had made her escape to Colorado, but now the horizon was calling her and she thought she would go to San Francisco. It sounded like a dream, so I didn't think a lot about it.
When the spring semester finished, however, it turned out that she was serious. She was leaving. She packed her belongings into that little yellow Karmann Ghia and headed out for the glamor of San Francisco. It was the early 80s, before the Great Darkness there, and as she drove away, looking like one of her own vintage postcards, a scarf flying around her neck, I envied her the adventure.
But I got her apartment. And her fern.
Which sits now by my front door. Lately, it astonishes me that it's so old. It's older than my children! It outlasted my marriage! Ian once gave it a radical haircut when he was two or three, right down to the dirt, but it came right back and grew more hair to thrive at nine addresses. And often, when I water it, I think of Jan and her bright lipstick and her kindness to a lost young woman. I'm pretty sure she knows what she gave, but if not, I'm sending a thank you out in the ether.
Do you have a memento (living or not) that reminds you of someone you lost touch with?
m training for the Avon Walk for breast cancer. I'll be posting weekly updates on my progress. 
Last week, total miles: 22
Miles this weekend: 9.5 yesterday, at the Santa Fe Trail. Perfect day for walking. Blue sky, slight breeze, temps in the fifties. (Cyclists by the zillions, racing through the mud. I realize I have a slight hostility about bikes on the trails and I really don't mind polite ones who ring the bell or say, "on your left!" or say anything at all, really. Only the Tour de France wanna be bad boys in their spandex, zooming by without any warning and scaring me half to death (I do, for the record, only put an earbud in one ear). It makes me happy to see the little spray of mud on their butts.) I listened to my favorite favorites on the Shuffle. Sometimes, I sing, but first I look around to be sure no one is there.
Today: On the schedule for today was to start doing the second long walk, so despite a brisk and bitter wind, I bundled up and headed out. 4.5 miles. It would have not bee that much fun except....
On the Ipod: Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Why oh why has it taken me so long to get to this book? It's music. It's love. It's a marvel of precise, exquisite execution. I'm in pain, having to leave it for the next walk, but it's eleven hours of tape, so that will see me through a lot of walking. Must....be....disciplined.....
Snacks: Just a Gu yesterday, at the halfway point. Nothing required today.
The pitch: I have committed to raising $2500 by June. It isn't a sponsorship, but direct donations to each walker's tally. The money goes to helping provide screening and care for women who are under- or uninsured, a cause about which I am passionate. If you feel moved to donate, you can do so, here.
The disclaimer: We all have things we care about and no one can give to everything, in time or money. xoxo,
Barbara
The dogs woke me up well before the sun this morning, and once I let them out, I crawled back into bed to doze for a little while. (Is there anything so luxurious as that half hour in the gloaming, curled in the warmth and the quiet?) Without distractions, my sleep-fresh brain spun out the answers to 4 of 5 nagging plot snags I've been dealing with, plus offered a good solid skeleton for a new book.
All in about twenty minutes. Still not sure about one plot point, but it's very small, so it doesn't matter.
This is why I personally should never, ever get on the internet or check email or turn on television news before I do my pages for the day. I once wrote an entire book on spec by setting the alarm at 5:30 so I could write on it before my boys woke up for school. Then I'd cook their breakfast, send them off, and go to work on the book that was under deadline.
Not everyone likes early morning. My mother says it makes her sick to her stomach to be awake before the sun, and stays up very late at night. So do my children. Have you ever experimented with your most productive times? Do you know when your brain is most alert?
Magazines are so luscious. I spend far too much money on them (especially as I am required to get rid of them after two months, no exceptions) but nothing quite equals the pleasure of that Friday afternoon perusal of the endless miles of glossy covers, with their tantalizing promises. Tantalizing Garlic Soup for Cold Winter Evenings! or Ten Steps to a Remarkable Life (only available here, in our magazine!). Training tips and life tips and cooking tips, all promising a better tomorrow.
And
that's only the taglines. Often, the photos are ever so much more alluring, like 
this cover of feet and flowers on Body and Soul, or photos of still lavender gardens on the upcoming spring garden magazines. I fall in love, fall inside, and I'm lost to the promises.
Every week, I bring home two or three or four magazines. I don't like to subscribe because that takes away some of the pleasure of going to the store and realizing the new issue of Saveur or Yoga Journal is on the shelves. (How could anyone not like Saveur, I ask you?) They fall into categories. The food magazines--Saveur and Gourmet, mainly, though I get some great recipes out of Oprah. The women's magazines, Oprah and Body and Soul and sometimes Martha Stewart Living (for the photos of flowers. And tables.) Finally, so many fitness or spiritual magazines, like Yoga Journal and Self and Shape and Runner and Women's Adventure, plus about two dozen others I cycle through according to what looks good that week. I take them home and sit in my big gold art deco chair with a cup of strong tea, and leaf through, tearing out photos for collages and recipes. I get my advice for the day, on skin care or meditation techniques or exercise, read some essays and mull them over, and then it's time for next week and the new crop.
It's relaxing. It's like television, only a little quieter and more specific to me and my own tastes.
How about you? Are you a magazine person? What magazines are you favorites and why? I might have missed one (oh the horror!). Do you read specific features or the whole thing, front to back?
I am training for the Avon Walk for breast cancer. I'll be posting weekly updates on my progress.
Last week, total miles: 21
Today's walk:
Miles: 10 and a bit, at the Santa Fe Trail, which is a very long trail that runs from Wyoming to New Mexico. Very pretty.
On the Ipod: Exercise mix #1, which consists of some Laura Love and Mellencamp and other things for the first half. Then switched to Letting God of God, by Julia Sweeney, which is so funny I was praying that none of the runners on the trail thought I was off my meds or something.
Snacks: Peanut butter, apple, Luna bar.
No real aches and pains, though my neck is a little stiff from carrying the heavier pack. (It's challenging to get the clothing correct for a long walk on a February afternoon in Colorado.)
The pitch: I have committed to raising $2500 by June. It isn't a sponsorship, but direct donations to each walker's tally. The money goes to helping provide screening and care for women who are under- or uninsured, a cause about which I am passionate. If you feel moved to donate, you can do so, here.
My passport is going to expire in a couple of months, and I have to mail it away to get a new one. It's been feeling a little like retiring my battered hiking boots. So many adventures we had together!
When I first applied for this passport, I had never been anywhere out of the country. I had traveled a fair amount around the US, which is a very big and varied land, but never even as far as Canada. It seems impossible that was only ten years ago, and slightly astonishing to realize that once I got that passport in my hand, baby, I was gone, gone, gone!
As a young girl, my only desires were to write books, see the world, and be happy. It's hard to grasp now how impossible it seemed to say those things--write books! See the world (the world?!) because we're a much more sophisticated population these days. At the time, at 14 or 15, I didn't know anyone who wrote anything, and the only person I knew who had traveled anywhere was my uncle, who had lived in Spain when I was a child.
By the time I finally got the passport, I'd sold a lot of books, and was fairly on fire to start travel, but I still had young teens in my house. So when I won a literary prize and knew I was going to spend it on travel, I took the boys with me. Ian was 15, I think, and Miles a couple of years younger. My mother went with us, too, also her first trip abroad, and we traipsed around England and Ireland for two weeks, a trip I planned entirely on my own with the nascent Internet, emailing with the owner of the flat we rented in Ealing, not far from the train which took us into London proper. We visited Bath and Ightham Mote, site of my beloved Green Darkness, and crossed the Irish sea to visit Cork and Dingle. Miles, a very picky eater, practically starved to death and lived on pastries, but his innate sense of direction kept us from gettin
g lost countless times. Ian charmed the old men in Ireland, who spoke to him in Gaelic, and he kissed the Blarney Stone, which might have had something to do with all those debate wins, but maybe he was just born a clever Irish talker.
From there, it was a leap to hike in France with my buddy Sonia, right before 9/11. A trip that changed my life in profound ways, ways that I'm still uncovering, years later. It was the trip that turned me into my fully hiking self and shook me loose of my old life and dumped me, unceremoniously, into the new one.
Which h
as actually turned out to be quite fine, and full of wanderings. Scotland and New Zealand one year (the lochs and mists and Wallace's sword, his very, very sword that he held once in his own hand; the Bay of Islands and that long, empty,
spectacular
beach in NZ, where a gang of wild horses trotted up to a ridge and scornfully looked down upon us, their wild manes blowing in the breeze). Canada, Vancouver and Victoria. And then England again, and Scotland, and Normandy's beaches and Paris. And then, the last one on this passport, Naples and Matera and Bari and Kent again last year.
So much! Such a blessing to have the freedom to travel.
What new stamps do I want to see in the new one? Australia will be there, and New Zealand. But also, I want to see those India stamps and perhaps Morrocco and Ireland again. Spain would be very nice, and Mexico. No doubt there will be plenty of England, to see CR's mother. And...I'll leave some surprises up to the Universe. It seems to sometimes have the most delightful things up its sleeves!
What stamps do you want to add to your passport?
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