Post-Thanksgiving, post-exhaustion, bleary-eyed greetings upon you all.
I had a great week off. I was in Colorado with my family, reconnecting. None of us lives in Colorado, so we were all equally in charge of house chores and cooking and entertainment - and it was great. There were hikes and long talks and games and more hikes and feasting and plans for the future. It was interesting to fall right back into my place at the childhood dinner table and yet try to break expectations. I hope you also got a chance to reconnect with your childhood self. (If only to remind yourself how far you have come.)
It snowed on Friday and everything I thought I knew was entirely transformed. No one could stop saying “it looks so fake.”
Isn’t it interesting that we are more inclined to believe that something beautiful is not real? What’s that about?
Beauty is real, my friends. Believe it.
Writing News:
The only news I have is that my brother emailed an editor of a (popular/religious/conservative) newsletter that he copiously reads and invited them to reprint the New York Times Metropolitan Diary entry that did so well for me—and they eagerly agreed to reprint it.
It is, after all, a feel-good piece about being kind to strangers. (Even if it was written by a New Yorker.)
What was hilarious to me was the timid way the newsletter editor emailed me to ask whether I had the right to this reprint (he literally wrote “I wouldn’t want to have to contact the Times”)
And luckily for me, rights immediately revert to the author as soon as the Times prints something in the Diary. So yay-all-around and yee-haw! (I’m delighted by the extra publication, I love being published in quirky places. The MOON is still my favorite - yes, if you missed my announcement a year or so ago, I have a story that is on the moon).
Oh and this also happened:
I did an interview for Duotrope in which I discussed the qualities that the judges seek when we look at entries for the Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents. It was all fine and good until they published it with a GLARING grammar mistake. Since the first round edits on our Fellowship consist of rejecting the stories that have too many egregious errors of grammar/spelling/contest rules, I feel really….ridiculous…about leaving the interview up (I emailed Duotrope to say I caught the error and they apologized, but they apparently they can not edit the published interviews.)
If you want to giggle at the irony of all this, here is the interview.
Random Final Thought:
In A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Snoopy and Woodstock sit down to carve a huge turkey and every year I can’t get over that Woodstock is a bird eating a bigger bird.
This scene becomes particularly creepy if you imagine a human holding a collarbone of a larger primate….
It’s a pretty ghastly tradition to break a bone with another person for luck. That said, we do it every year!
Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving!! Here is a single snowflake for you: