Over the past few days, I’ve spent a lot of time staring off into space. I grin foolishly at inappropriate moments, babble to bored friends, and make stranges faces when nobody is looking or sometimes even when they are. In short, I have all the classic symptoms. I admit it. I […]

In the beginning of M.M. Kaye’s classic suspense novel, Death in Zanzibar, she writes that she was captivated by the notion of Zanzibar after hearing a song with the refrain, “Then I’ll go sailing far– off the Zanzibar!” That song was well off the charts by the time I came into being, but for […]

Don’t hate the little guy in the toga. Every year, as the drugstore trots out its red doily decorations, all my single friends grumble that there are no more good men/women/sheep out there and threaten to wear black, while all the coupled ones wail about the pressures of expectation and the impossibility of attaining […]

A few weeks ago, our own Access Romance Interview Team stumped me with one of their hard-hitting questions. No, it wasn’t that perennial favorite, “Where do you get your ideas?” It wasn’t even “Why do I always have fewer socks when I empty the dryer than I had to […]

When I was in third grade, we had to write a composition entitled, “Turkey Lurkey had his own reasons to be grateful.” Clearly, his gratitude was not owing to the person who named him. What reasonable turkey names its offspring Lurkey? It’s downright cruel. But I digress. Like the ill-named […]

After many years of leading the carefree life of the perpetual student, I’ve finally knuckled down and plunged into that last great American rite of passage: the Office Job. Having pressed my shirt, bought extra pairs of stockings (since the first few were sure to rip before I left the house) and set no […]

All right, so perhaps it isn’t quite Halloween yet. But the displays of plastic pumpkins and light-up tombstones have been up in the drugstore for more than a month now, and I’ve drunk so many pumpkin spice lattes that I’m about to turn into a pumpkin. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s […]