Photo by Felixco, Inc

I have been incredibly grateful to so many of you over the course of Penny Jar’s life. This is just a note to let you know that I have moved permanently over to V’s Place: An artists’ cafe. I hope you will join me there along with a myriad of writers, artists and musicians. I encouraged you also to submit to Fourth Monday, an ongoing celebration of art and words.

If you are a subscriber to Penny Jar, please consider subscribing at V’s Place; it’s great to have you around!

I am so happy to welcome you to V’s Place: Grand Opening on the fortuitous occasion of the Chinese New Year.

V’s Place made its debut on January 1st of this year, and is ecstatic to open its doors today to guest contributors across artistic genres. We are also celebrating this event with an assortment of hidden prizes and a door prize of The Dead Shoe Society, an anthology that features my story “The Deadest One” along with several other talented authors. Read more…

A note: at the end of the month I won’t be posting on this page anymore. I would love to have you come with me over to the new site, so please remember to update your subscriptions over on the the left hand side of the page, or follow along with Google Friend Connect. I’d be glad to have you!

Before the inception of this site, I spent time considering the themes I explore in my writing. When I began blogging three years ago, I thought the only thing I had to write about was motherhood. It seemed feasible and popular. If I was going to take a chance on something it may as well be the life I’m steeped in.

What I found out is that I don’t write about motherhood. Mothering isn’t what drives me to write, that happened long before I had kids of my own. Read more…

This is what’s playing today at V’s Place:

A note: at the end of the month I won’t be posting on this page anymore. I would love to have you come with me over to the new site, so please remember to update your subscriptions over on the the left hand side of the page, or follow along with Google Friend Connect. I’d be glad to have you!

I’ve started a novel. This wasn’t in my plans for the year and I wasn’t going to tell you about it. I have a habit of losing steam in a project if I talk too long and hard, and a problem with believing in it’s fulfillment, but I have a good feeling about this one. You already know the most basic story line; it’s about a girl named Bermuda. I can’t get her out of my head.

In the last few days, aside from emailing every-which-way and jumping up and down from the excitement of the Grand Opening here at V’s Place, I bought, downloaded and tutorialed a writing program called “Scrivener*.” Read more…

“I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, “To hell with you.”-Saul Bellow

I did not receive a pre-holiday rejection this past year; this particular publication was kind enough to wait until the second of January. If you cannot wrap an acceptance in shiny paper and bows, I am grateful to be turned down after the champagne and cookies have done their celebratory best.

What was more unusual to me was the discovery, via Facebook, that a few of my writing colleagues also received the same rejection from the same publication on the same day. Read more…

Flying Lantern by bulldogza

I’m feeling giddy. I love planning and building and making things. Projects. The momentum forward as pieces click together and recognizable shapes take form. Movement and motion. The celebration of completion.

Building this website was a project in frustration, but I’m thrilled with the way it came together. Toward the end I started thinking of it less as a page and a blog about me and more as a community of its own. Read more…

Photo by taesmileland

Happy New Year! I’m so excited. I’ve moved to a permanent home. I really hope you like the new digs.

Tabula Rasa

It is the new year, our annual slate-clearing fete rife with certain promise and a dire hope for a better tomorrow. It is no coincidence that I chose this day to ring the bells and melt the wax on my own virtual tablet, welcoming you in to a new online home.

In philosophy there is a theory, the tabula rasa, that we are born with no personal mental content, but that we must gain ourselves through perception and experience. Read more…

First of all, I’m in that book I’ve been talking about, but I really don’t know what anyone thinks about it as a whole. A few friends snapped it up right away and read my story. One even read it the day it came out and was sweet enough to embarrass me with gushy love on Facebook. Overall, I just wonder. Was the content and the first person point of view a little too…too? My sis read it, but declined to comment. Maybe it was all the cookies I put in front of her. I’m sure they were too much to handle.

I was excited to hear it had a “creep” factor. That’s good, yeah?

What I’m really thinking about right now is moving from this blog to a new website of my very own. I’m still hanging out on WordPress, but under my own name. It’s exciting, but I’m realizing how much I don’t know about putting a webpage together. I get a lot of fancy ideas, but I’m never really sure how to make them magically happen. They say, learn HTML. They say, learn CSS. Yep.

So I have to take off right now and grab a bottle of shampoo and a clean shirt. I left my purse behind on Christmas Eve and my kids need new fancy dancing shoes for a New Year’s wedding. Anybody want a cookie?

How do you celebrate?

Before we left, my husband said, “Don’t you want to tell your mom…” I gave him a dirty look and hit him with a pillow before he finished the sentence. He was asking about the book. He’s all proud of me and wants me to show myself off. But I can’t, not with Ma.

If anything, she’ll want to read the thing and as happy as I am with the outcome and as thrilled as I am with the anticipation of it all, I know my story isn’t for her. She won’t “get it.” Some people just require straightforward storytelling.

If I’m going to be completely honest with you, which I usually am in an attempt to destroy barriers and cast off annoying restraints, I’m not overly enthusiastic about my family reading most of the things I write. Everyone else in the world, fine. But family is…

Today my friend and writing companion Lisa Rivero posted this link on her Facebook page with the following quote:

There is absolutely no room for censorship or political correctness in a novel. Your job as a writer is to give us the truth about your characters – which may or may not have anything to do with you as a human being.

I qualify myself in certain circumstances, “Well, just, you know, it’s a story.” With anyone outside my family I’m a brave little writing anarchist armed with obscure plot devices and Freudian slips, but there, in Ma’s living room, I’m a fake.

And it’s stupid.

But if you want to know the real truth of it, most of the family won’t care. And that’s a hard thing for a loud-mouth writer to accept.

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