manscript and red pen

Is it Six Thirty? Nine Fifteen?

Karin Kallmaker Craft of Writing

Editing,-I-love-it!

Okay, be honest. Did you read the title and think I left out two hyphens? I understand why the hyphen in emailhad to go. It was a fairly new word and still hadn’t been standardized. But for as long as I’ve been reading books, the time of day was expressed six-thirty. Or nine-fifteen. Or twelve-thirty-two. What possible misunderstanding on the part of reader caused the powers that be at the Chicago Manual to decide that twelve thirty two was better? I can’t help myself…I had to go back and take out the hyphens after I typed the previous sentence. Read More

The Things You Thought You’d Never Say

Karin Kallmaker Cheers & Chocolate

everybodysnuts

If you’re like me, when you were younger, you swore there were things you would never ever say. Like “Because I said so.” All parents know that you violate those early on; parents say them because they’re the literal truth. It is all fun and games until someone loses an eye, it makes no sense to jump off a cliff even if all your friends do, and you will eat it and like it because your other choice is starvation, and I mean it. Read More

Rosie the Riveter closeup

Apply Acid and Scrub

Karin Kallmaker Cheers & Chocolate, LIFE + STYLE

Rosie the Riveter closeup
I got the proverbial fly up my fundament about the floor this week. About 75% of our downstairs (about a thousand square feet) is a light sandy Italian tile that doesn’t ever show much dirt. The grout color was “mobe pearl.” I don’t know what a “mobe” is but for several years now, the only “pearl” that described most of the grout would have been the name of Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship. Read More

From the hand drawn 1989 Naiad Press cover of In Every Port, a silhouetted women in blue gazes out an airplane window at clouds.

20 Years and 20 More

Karin Kallmaker Events and Appearances, In Every Port, Readers and Libraries, Stepping Stone

CONTENTS

My very first book was published in 1989. That’s right – twenty years ago. In the last century. It could make a person feel old. But I feel grateful.

I could probably write volumes about the last twenty years, most of it only interesting to me and some of it not even. I think I’ll pass. Instead, I want to continue the theme of being grateful, because I’ve just arrived home after a wonderful trip, the kind of trip that most folks think authors do all the time, and most authors will tell you are rare. I hopped a flight to Dallas, the Big D. And I met about 60 lesbians I’d never met before. Read More