Interview on About.com

About.com editor (and amazing novelist) Rachel Sherman took the time me talk with me about my first love, the journal jmww, which emerged in 2005 between me and fellow Towson Graduate Catherine Harrison. We also talk about writing, participating in the writing community, and time management:

not only must you write, write, write, but you must read. You must support the literary ecosystem by attending readings, buying books, writing reviews, sharing on social media, etc. You also have to build your own platform so that, by the time your book is published, you have a cadre of people who know your work and are excited to read more. Your drive has to equal your level of passion, and you have to believe in your work and be resilient. Just as writers are agitated that everyone they meet thinks they can write, that it’s easy when it’s not, writers should treat writing as seriously as they defend it to nonwriters.

To read more, go here.

Favorite jogging routes; Baltimore Harbor

One of our favorite routes when we're not on the track is the waterfront path from Canton waterfront park to Fells Point. You can make it work so that it's five miles, and you can even make it longer, but the Korean War Memorial down to Henderson's Wharf is about five miles if you follow the waterfront and don't cut down any streets on your way to Henderson's Wharf.

I like it because, despite all the new condo development in the past ten years, there's still a lot of of the old port city to see. When people think of the Inner Harbor, they think of Harborplace and the constellation and not the old Baltimore, as shown, rather unconvincingly in this backdrop in Hitchcock's Marnie:



But it does still exist. On many days you can see clipper ships:



And, of course, The Baltimore Comfort, the Navy hospital ship that is always in and out of port, whether to aid in wars or natural disasters like Katrina:



But my favorite ships are just the ordinary working ships you see as you jog on the promenade. (This is actually the Japanese ship Kashima, that docked in Baltimore this past summer as part of a training squadron.)



I don't think much about writing during my jogs. I usually don't think about anything, except how far I have to go and how I'm breathing. But this clearing of the mind enables me to work better when I do sit down to write. At least, I'd like to think so. And not everyone can take advantage of such gorgeous outside landscapes. Another reason I heart Baltimore