Category: reflection

• reflection

  Fighting Imposter Syndrome

  Approximately every other week, at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, I meet with Laurel Olsen Wenson at our favorite Panera Bread (where we are both now members of The Sip Club). We drink iced coffee and for about three hours, we write. This week, I realized something. Sometimes what makes something special is…

  28 Sep 2025
• events reflection

  A belated Parisian Phoenix birthday

  In a few days, it will be my dad’s birthday. Shortly before Christmas, it will be the fourth anniversary of his death. Two weeks ago, it was also the fourth anniversary of Parisian Phoenix Publishing. I missed it— because I was knee-deep in annual medical appointments and production schedules. I completely…

  27 Sep 2025
• reflection

  Find the joy

  My PSA: Earlier this month, I had one of those weeks where I was scheduled from sun-up past sun-down every single day. It exhausted me. And we all know better, but sometimes this kind of week is unavoidable. For me, it happened because my annual medical appointments happen in September,…

  23 Sep 2025
• news reflection

  Lawsuits involving AI & the importance of copyright

  In the car this morning, I listened to a Wall Street Journal podcast about the recent lawsuit between authors and Anthropic AI. A judge recently ruled that Anthropic could use authors’ work to train its AI model under fair use if the works were acquired in such a way that compensated the author. Originally,…

  14 Sep 2025
• events from the publisher reflection review

  Drag Culture and Existentialism

  Now, if Existentialist explores the meaninglessness of existence, (I talked about Existentialism yesterday) I would propose that drag culture celebrates our existence in every form and every nuance. Both Existentialism and Drag Culture force us to explore and critique society’s values, but wheres Existentialists are rather sullen about their conclusions, drag culture…

  31 Aug 2025
• fiction reflection

  Frosties and Existentialism

  In my childhood, Frosties came in chocolate. Then, in my 21-year-old daughter’s lifetime, they added vanilla. But now, it seems they have this list of flavors that sound like a DQ married a Starbucks: This led to a household discussion of decision fatigue, and the comment of one of our friends, in…

  30 Aug 2025
• reflection

  Back to School

  The dog started barking at 7:28 a.m., and I said to my daughter (who was packing her bag for her 8 a.m. college class), “What she barking at? It’s too early to be barking. There should be nothing going on.” And then, I realized. The bus stop for all the…

  29 Aug 2025
• parisian phoenix author reflection review

  Shedding Light on Dark Realities

  By Geraldine Donaher, author of the upcoming Young Adult novel Mouth Shut Head Down I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These recently. Her writing has a bare-minimum quality that is refreshing to read. Too many words and sometimes a story gets lost. Keegan reveals the horrors of trafficking by…

  2 Aug 2025
• coming soon fiction from the publisher new releases nonfiction reflection

  For the love of airplanes and travel… part 1

  Many people schedule their family vacations for the summer, but I’ve always found family vacations to be expensive and laborious undertakings that require more coordination and efforts than what they yield. I’m more a random road trip kind of person, or travel bare bones with a friend. My favorite traveling…

  18 Jul 2025
• from the publisher reflection

  Angel Ackerman experiments with ChatGPT

  ChatGPT came up in conversation several times last week and I expressed my usual concerns that (1) people need to fact check ChatGPT because it relies on generic scanning of the Internet and we all know how accurate the Internet-at-large is, and (2) we don’t know how/where ChatGPT sources its…

  13 Jul 2025