Below is an excerpt from "Grandma" that describes the moment of book-birth. Having fled my own little country of Cal, I was in Oregon house-sitting for my children and tasked with taking care of their dogs. I had volunteered for this assignment, but not without an underlying agenda of my own--reviving a book I had been stalled on for months.

"I turn on my laptop and bring up my estranged novel. This work has become a relationship gone bad for me-like an old love that you can still get misty about, but would walk a mile to avoid seeing again. I had thought spending a week with it in a new locale-the hope of every romantic-would stoke the fires of my once-burning desire. But as I electronically leaf through the pages, the only thing that happens is what's been happening for months: nothing. If this relationship isn't dead, it is most certainly in an impressive coma. And I get the distinct feeling that there will be no resurrection from either death or comatosity on this particular week.

I get up and pour myself another cup of coffee. Always a good ploy in the face of disheartening reality. Sitting on the couch, with my laptop blinking a few feet dead ahead, another light begins to blink. For the last few months, I've been thinking-casually, of course, just for fun, really-of writing a journal about the slow and path I'm taking to becoming a grandmother. There are others like me, aren't there? Women who don't relate to the stereotype and all its unsettling implications?

Without consulting my mind, my body starts to move toward the computer, triggering a string of sentences and a trumped up heartbeat. The dogs are back at the window. What are you doing? their frowning faces seem to ask. I wonder the same thing myself, but it feels too good to stop. I'm writing again."