Every once in a while, someone tells me about my best friend. Well, she isn’t actually, objectively speaking my best friend. Best friendships are a relationship like any other relationship. One can only justifiably call someone a best friend if the other person feels the same way. So anyway, once upon a time, I had […]
moreThings are shifting. I used to hate rewriting. But these days, I can hardly wait to start rewriting. It now means the hard part is actually over. I suppose it's logical. Getting 85,000 new words down once is a personal challenge (I counted, it was more than 60,000). But getting the same amount of new words […]
moreThe more I make my way to the end of my novel, the more worried I'm becoming. Not only is there the debilitating worry I've had all along – what is of so much importance to me that I feel I should be telling it to the world? (The answer being: who cares, even about […]
moreAt the local drugstore, I ran into a well known writer. Her most recent novel had won a few prizes. It had taken her seven years to write. One of the things she said in an interview somehow always stuck to my mind: she mentioned she had very few female friends and preferred to hang […]
moreIt was after dark and she was sitting on the Copacabana beach, her pale arms around her knees. She was a golden haired and white skinned eighteen year old. She seemed oblivious to the fat black man sitting across from her. He was studying her cleavage. A skinny boy from the favela sat next to […]
moreLast week, I went to a colleague writer's book launch. I usually enter this kind of situation feeling like I have to arm myself. You see, the entire world is my enemy and therefore so are my peers. My choice of weapon is usually an exaggerated smile. It's not a very defensive strategy, in fact […]
moreDuring flamenco class, my teacher said: “flamenco isn’t simply a collection of individual sequences or steps that just happen to be there. Every single step leads to the next, they are all interconnected. While dancing a given step, you should already be flowing into the next.” One day I should print all these flamenco wisdoms, […]
moreFor my Dutch speaking friends out there, here's an article I wrote that was published in this months magazine 'Opzij.'
moreToday was Botox day again. I’m always nervous, this time even more so as I was treated by a newly trained ENT doctor. I’ve been wondering why the procedure still gives me heart palpitations after ten years. I suppose it doesn’t help that they stick a needle straight through my neck. But there’s more to […]
more9.30 am. In the supermarket, a woman bumped into me. She was squeezing plums, checking to see if they were ripe. They weren't. She scowled. Not only at the plums, but also at me. She wore a cap against the rain and was carrying two bags: a lap top case and a sports bag. They […]
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