Imagine yourself in a mini-van full of noisy grade school children.  The air conditioning blasts your face with icy air, but a bead of sweat trickles down the middle of your back and disappears in your clinging clothes.  School.  August.  Arizona.  It doesn’t make sense. You turn up the radio at the request of the…

My eighteen year old sister rarely calls me, but for some reason I was on her mind one night in late August, 2013. The conversation was simple.  She wasn’t asking me.  She was telling me. “You should write a novel.  November is National Novel Writing month.  We should both do it this year.” I couldn’t…