closeup of da-AL kissing her youngest black lab mix

Welcome!

If you enjoy this blog, you’ll love my still-unreleased novels. “Flamenco and the Sitting Cat” and “Tango and the Sitting Cat” are my love letters to you and to all who worry they’re too odd or old, overly damaged or young, or under deserving of happiness alone or with someone.

About Me

da-AL with Emmy
My Emmy statuette.

Reading, writing, and travel hooked me early. It was inevitable, given my multi-cultural family’s love of books and our frequent relocations to cities across the U.S. and Spain. Through it all, writing to friends and my dear grandmothers in Buenos Aires and Barcelona was a constant. Today I’m settled in Los Angeles with my Iranian-American husband who loves world dance, cooking, healthy living, music, and animals as much as I do. K-D, our one-of-a-kind-mix dog, rescues me from brooding over commas for too long.

As a journalist, I won an Emmy (click here for the documentary), was nominated for one the year before, and earned assorted cable TV awards. One of my short stories is in Verdad Magazine. Twice, I was honored as an “Emerging Author” at the Literary Women Festival of Authors, and my visual art features in “New Directions in Altered Books,” by Gabe Cyr and California State Long Beach’s literary journal, Rip Rap.

Engage

  1. Fill in the “follow” bar on this page.
  2. Like and follow my Facebook author page.
  3. Follow me on BlueSky.
  4. Let’s be Twitter friends: @ContactdaAL.
  5. Talk books with me on Goodreads: da AL.
  6. Follow me on Medium.
  7. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
  8. Follow my blog with Bloglovin.
  9. Connect with me at Instagram.

388 thoughts on “Welcome!”

  4. da-AL, What a great website…you are about so much here! You book! Your dogs! And more!!! I can feel your energy here!!! I must look around more! I found you by your “Like” on my comment on JoytotheWorld!!! ….where I typed MY OWN website incorrectly! It is excuseusforliving.com “Try it! You’ll like it!” Phil

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Phil, you are so kind! Indeed, your site is wonderful — & you cover quite a lot there too. All the blogging advice I read says we should specialize, but it’s difficult to do when there are so many fun things to discuss!

      Liked by 2 people

      1. da-AL, Thanks for the nice reaction to my website! The advice to specialize our websites is a good general rule if the number of viewers/stats is our objective. However, when I started my website in January 2012 my objective was not to be pigeon-holed & to write about anything I wanted to. I very quickly realized that to write on political topics immediately alienated 50% of the population in the USA. So my political stuff is limited to public policy where my liberal Democratic viewpoint becomes no secret. And so in the right margin on my website at the bottom, the topics range from humor to books to history to economic policy to PASTA recipes & more!!! But from a post every two weeks, I went to every three weeks, to once a month & now once every other month. Each post, start to finish, takes me 12 hours. I now find it a burden in the balance of my life with other priorities. And yet it has been such a joy & I have learned so much & met so many people like you! Some amazing things have come out of it….editing two poetry books in English by a Dutch author & meeting her for lunch in 2016 with my wife in Amsterdam at the start of a Rhine river cruise. And it all started with my first post which was really a newspaper column/commentary that I wrote & was published in a New Jersey newspaper. I hope you found this interesting talk. Thanks for listening! And thanks for the “Like” on my “8th PastaPost” & your comment! Phil

        Liked by 3 people

  5. You have a lovely smile! Thanks for visiting my blog recently. I go through life one day at a time with no guarantee that there will be another one coming. They are all gifts.

    Liked by 4 people

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