Welcome to Here's My Stuff. I've established an alternative blog in which to publish the three novels I've written and put aside. I tried to write memoirs and stories on windfall, then put some space aside for my fiction. But somehow it doesn't work out right in my head. Two different kinds of writing.

When I started writing on windfall I decided, as a writer's challenge, to post something every day if possible, even if it was just one paragraph. Meeting this challenge has healed the pain of writing from my heart and soul, then sending my stuff to anonymous people and getting rejected. Some have the ability to keep bouncing back and trying; but I'm 61 and I want to be a happy writer NOW. So here we go.

Sitting Shiva For Terry is based, to an extent, on my mother's experience of losing her husband (my father) at the age of 44. Letitia Silverblatt is my "mother" character. Terrence Silverblatt is the name of her husband who passed away. My father's name was Sherwin and people called him "Sherry." So the dead husband in the novel is Terry (it rhymes) and the whole novel is a kind of long-winded "sitting shiva" for him.

Here are the bare bones of Sitting Shiva For Terry. Letty loses her husband under traumatic circumstances and her grasp on living begins to fail. She is literally wasting away--she can't eat--and she is talking to her dead husband every day at dusk. One step leads to another and as a byproduct of taking long walks to improve her health, she finds a dignified old house on a forgotten street between Oakland and the Hill District.

The stories tell the rest.