So, as with all fears, the best thing to do is hit it head-on. Write that terrifying love scene first, before you've created all the backstory, before your characters themselves have realized they are going to fall in love. You'll come back to it again and again, but getting it out, on the page, as raw and terrible as it will be in that first draft, at least puts some perspective on it and you can get on with all the other writerly tasks at hand.
Incidentally, getting it on the page early and coming back to it over and over also helps a writer tap into the honesty you need for such a scene. Readers are always particularly aware of phoniness in love scenes, and once you've stumbled over your own infelicitous word or image for the twelfth time you'll finally remove it and plunge yourself into that place where you go to find the realest, truest emotions. Once you've opened that up, you'll remove the artifice and be left with something pure and honest.You also run writers' retreats in Israel - tell me about them: how does it feel to be a facilitator?
Oh, the retreats are great fun. We get the most wonderful groups of 30 to 35 people each time, people who bring their rich life experience along with a desire to hone their craft. They are inspired and inspiring.
I am planning, with several prominent and excellent writer-friends of mine in Israel and abroad, to hold an international writing retreat in Israel in December 2009. It's only in the planning stages now, but the ideas are mouth-watering…
In the meantime, although I'll be abroad again several times this year for events related to Light Fell, I am hoping to create a writers' center close to home – that is, in a studio in my own back garden. The writing center I envision will offer workshops for writers at various stages in their writing lives as well as sessions with visiting writers and a host of other options I can only dream about at the moment.
Tell us something that's not on the official bio.
I eat half a dozen bananas a day, they're sustenance for me and comfort food all in one. I've never recovered from owning a chocolate-brown Triumph Spitfire convertible in my early twenties (which I sold for $2000 when I moved to Israel) and am sorely tempted to buy a roadster now, even though my kids say they'll be too embarrassed to drive with me. I miss the four seasons of my Ohio childhood, but the Mediterranean beach near my house quite adequately dulls the pangs of longing. I studied ballet at the age of 40 in order to understand a character in my second novel, and resumed piano lessons recently -- after a 30-year hiatus -- because I felt it was time to progress beyond my abilities as a 16-year-old
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