At first I asked myself: have you never looked at clouds before, Peggy? Was all this extraordinary stuff overhead here your whole life and you never noticed? But then I discussed the matter with others.  I'm not the only one in a state of astonishment over the recent cloudscapes.  The sky over central North Carolina […] Read More

My 2001 novel Sister India, set in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, emerged in recent days as an e-book.  Appropriately for a book from the bank of the Ganges, it was re-released by the original publisher, Riverhead, an imprint of The Penguin Group. I am very happy to have this book easily available again. […] Read More

Holding a  book signing at a skin spa is definitely "thinking outside of the books."  (Good one, yes?) Sister novelist Carrie Knowles and I wrapped up the recent Virginia leg of our Crazy Ladies Book Tour in the most charming of locations: Rosehips Beauty boutique and skin spa in Newport News.  The proprietor and beauty […] Read More

The Crazy Ladies Book Tour got a four-hour head start driving across Richmond to look for the bookstore where we were expected. We'd almost missed our broadcast splash the previous day by taking a wrong turn on the way to the WTVR-CBS studio, arriving three frantic minutes after the appointed hour.  (We did make it […] Read More

C.J. Knowles at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Back from four days on the road with Carrie Jane Knowles, as her book cover calls her. She and I were out on a Virginia segment of our Crazy Ladies Book Tour. What an adventure! Here's Day One-and-a-Half:  When we arrived at 7:15 p.m. in Richmond […] Read More

Namibia      Photo by Jim Maney. The odds of noticing a pink elephant or a cobalt blue coconut are thought to improve (see post) if a person is mentally focused on seeing such a sight. A day or so after my post on this principle, Jim Maney kindly  arranged for me to see a pink elephant […] Read More

  I was wobbling a bit in my determination to go to my second Moral Monday this week. Standing around listening to an hour and a half of speeches wasn’t calling me. (Though certainly I wanted to contribute again to the protest against what the NC General Assembly is doing to women, blacks, the poor, […] Read More

Once I get something in my head, it turns up everywhere.  A color, for example.  The day after my launch of Cobalt Blue in L.A.  I was walking on the beach with my friend Randee Russell Bieler and three cobalt blue coconuts washed up in the shallow foamy edge of the surf.  Now probably cobalt […] Read More

A neo-Zen koan:  Can one reach enlightenment while obsessed with one's books' Amazon rankings? The answer might seem obvious.  But in my busy little brain, it's not obvious at all.  Brain says:  who needs enlightenment…or any of what that easy word stands for? I'd probably go with snarky Brain's take on this, except that it […] Read More

It was stirring.  A pep rally for justice.  Click on this green link for a moment of audio/video to give you a feel of the day: MVI_2826 I was late coming to the table for Moral Monday.  It has been going on for weeks. What is it, you ask (if you're not from NC)?  It's […] Read More