Brrr...

It's freezing in San Francisco right now. At least for San Francisco. I used to live at the base of The Swiss Alps. It was warmer there in February than it is riding on my motorcycle past sundown in San Francisco.

Still, I love it. Yesterday I hung out in Hayes Valley. The picture above is the corner of Hayes and Octavia.

This one from a parking lot off Hayes closer to Gough.

After looking at cool shoes and eighty dollar tee shirts for a while, I settled at Cafe La Vie where I stayed for hours reading and commenting on manuscripts. The young woman there was very kind to me as I struggled to figure out how to get online with my handheld Windows device. Now I'm half way through my pile of finals that I'm reading from last semester. Some of my students blew me away with their creativity. It's amazing how the careful consideration of craft can enable a writer to bridge that gap between what they love to read and what they're able to write. Today I start on the Characterization finals.

I'm getting ready to head up north for a couple of days to visit the coastline and spend some time in The Russian River valley. Janis, the protagonist in my novel, who looks something like this:



(I've been seeing this graffiti artist around town a lot...and this one almost always stops me in my tracks)

...(continued from above:) spent part of many summers there as a kid (as did I...and I have barely been back since). I need to do some research. I'm also really looking forward to being in a little cabin with a desk and a fireplace and no cell phone reception for four days and three nights.

I've spent the morning preparing for Start Your New Year Off Write. A Creative Writing Laboratory and trying to decide where to send excerpts of the novel for publication while I work on it. I finally decided to send one piece to a place where one of my favorite writers, Terese Svoboda, often places her work. Keep your fingers crossed for me. 

Happy Holidays and More Soon.