In medias res. That's where I'll have to begin. It's where I am pretty much all the time anyway.
I've been reading an interview with poet Mark Doty in the September 2011 Writer's Chronicle. Quite a few moments in the interview resonate for me. Here's one:
"Dictionaries are like bookstores, in that you go in looking for something specific, and often turn up all sorts of intriguing possibilities you hadn't known before. It's a bedeviling question, how you know what you don't know, and surely one answer is to put yourself in situations where you're likely to encounter what you haven't met yet. This is the nature of reading–you're either finding out things you don't know about at all, or you're finding things named that you recognize but have never seen said before."
Alison,
Congratulations on your new website and blog.