Marion Agnew

One way I relax is to draw lines on pages. One page at any given time. But, over the years, many pages. Many sketchbooks of pages, in fact. I like sketchbooks. I like drawing lines in them. They get full. The End. Let's be clear: I do not do this as ART, art , or art , and I don't even do it as art . It is not a statement about anything. Except that I like colo(u)rs. I like doing something with my hands. I like to do repetitive tasks when I need to relax, focus, or daydream. It's fun for me. Colo(u)red pens and what people here call "pencil crayons" add to the fun. Some lines I make are official Zentangles (TM) (go to the link to see what it's all about) but (I love to follow rules, but also, I don't) most aren't. I have even filled at least one sketchbook with straight lines in different widths and colo(u)rs, when I was first playing with a particular set of felt-tip pens. (Crayola, okay? I'm telling you, I'm not a serious arti

Revising. Man oh man. So, you remember how Fred Flintstone drives his car? How, after he leaps in, he has to scrabble his feet for a while before the car finally starts moving? Recently I realized I've been doing some of that as I revise this novel. It's been going well. Sorta. That is, I've been making lots of changes. After the initial surgical removal of an entire plot line, the word count has been rising and falling as I cut and replace and expand and lop again. But. Have I made progress? Yes! and no. I completed several large tasks and tracked the ripples through the rest of the chapters. After that, my activity took the form of messing around making smaller changes, without actually addressing the crucial big revisions that represent the necessary, exciting, and scary improvement to the last two-fifths of the book. But I didn't know that I was stalling. After all, I was working every day, changing words! Adding them! Cutting them! See? Progress! Last wee

I had a medical checkup today. Here are a few things I've been pondering in the car and waiting rooms, and, to be honest, in the middle of the night last night. 1. Medical appointments aren't performances. They are simply progress reports--a way for you to find out the way you're living, even on those days you don't have an appointment. 2. However. Even knowing #1, sometimes you (one) (I) can't help but be nervous about a medical appointment. (See: middle of the night last night.) 3. As my sister said when I was texting her from the waiting room, "Everybody's got something." We're all human, and humans are imperfect, and even when you're (one is) (I'm) generally healthy, which I am and am extremely grateful for, things happen. Sometimes big things, sometimes small. Sometimes they need fixing, sometimes they don't, and sometimes they can't be fixed. 4. For the most part, it's good when your doctor isn't particularly i

We've been calling this summer "the summer of all the house projects." Truthfully, every summer has its share, but this summer seems to have MORE than its share. Some we planned for: replacing the multi-paned picture windows, and in the process (we hope) stopping significant leaks; shoring up the landscaping that makes it possible to park cars near the house; rolling the new roofing paper over the bathroom at the camp to address wind damage. Some we didn't plan for: the slow leak from the main 2nd-floor bathroom down the pipes into the basement, the existence of which my husband has suspected for some time (I guess it's good we found it) and the repair of which required cutting drywall, which has now been replaced and painted over; the birch branch that dropped seventy or so feet to clock the top of the car, creating several large dents and taking out the roof rack. OK, so the camp and the car aren't "house." But they were also projects. All