about

They’re the hours between midnight and 4:00am. The hours when everything’s quiet and still, when you feel like you might be the only person awake for miles. Maybe the only person awake in the world. The owl hours, the darkest hours, and the most magical hours. They’re the hours created especially for writers, I think.

I wrote that back in 2011, when I was a freshman in high school and creating this blog at 12:33am, which should give you a good idea of my sleep habits back then. Now – fifteen years later – I’m still not a morning person, and I’m still drawn to a particular quality of quiet that I first found in the witching hours of the night. A theater before the audience files in. An empty church. An office after everyone else has gone home. A Tokyo neighborhood late at night, the streets quiet. These, perhaps, are also the owl hours.

I originally started this blog to record the thoughts that occurred to me then, in those hushed moments when I could hear myself think. At the time, I was adjusting to being in a blended family in which I was one of five kids. Stillness was hard to come by, except late at night.

As an adult, I live in a household of one. Stillness is fairly easy to find, at least on the outside. But the world has only gotten noisier in the interim, and what they don’t tell you about growing up is that a lot of the noise starts to come from the inside too.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been craving a quiet corner for myself lately. A place, once again, where I can hear myself think. So that’s what The Owl Hours is: a record of thoughts, and a secluded little space on the internet. Welcome.

I’m Mara, the proprietress of The Owl Hours. While I’m currently attending business school, in lives past I’ve been a content strategist in the tech industry, a stage manager, a bookseller… and for one brief but memorable stretch, an actress and model.

I grew up among the redwood trees of the Bay Area, and my life has since played out in a combination of New York, the Pacific Northwest, and Tokyo, Japan. And I’ve been blogging throughout, writing online since 2009.

In terms of who I am and how I approach the world, I’ve got a few things that I believe. Guidelines, if you will. In no particular order, they are:

1. If something’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing with care.
2. Leave the world a better place than you found it.
3. Be kind where you can. Be polite where you can’t.
4. Pay attention. It would be such a waste, not to marvel at the world.
5. And remember, it’s not all that serious.

On that less serious note, here’s a few random facts to leave you with: I can’t stand coffee (but I love tea), I have a small obsession with clouds, and I’m a big fan of physical letters and the postal service in general.

I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.

Indeed, there is. In order to make sure that you’re only getting the content you want, there are three different feeds you can choose from: the blog, fiction, and the logbook. (Those are the RSS links, if you prefer that to email.) The first two categories are fairly self-explanatory, and the third is an ongoing record of my current attempts to write a novel. If you’re signing up via email, you’ll be prompted to choose the feeds you want after clicking the Subscribe button.

How lovely! You can reach me at mara@theowlhours.com. I look forward to hearing from you.