The Green Study will return on June 15th, 2017.
It’s down to the wire on getting my novel draft out to some amenable friends and family for reader input. Thanks to my skillful procrastination, this will be like writing my senior thesis in college, except that I won’t be running to someone’s office, reeking of all-night coffee, cigarettes and stale sweat, clutching a mangled stack of papers. Fortunately for my beta readers, I will only be repelling the postal carrier and she’s used to that.
Until my return in a couple of weeks, I leave you with the latest bits and bobs from my brain. I’m having a clear out so that I can wrestle my unwieldy novel into compliance.
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On a holiday to honor and memorialize the war dead, you can also get futons 20% off. I tend to agree with some veterans that Memorial Day should never have been moved in the 1960s to create a three-day holiday weekend. I associate the smell of barbecue with the day, more than the stench of war. I say move it back to May 30th and create a three day voting weekend during a warmer time of year. Let’s make voting a bigger deal, in order to truly honor those who have fallen.
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Yesterday, I went off to do my favorite thing – peruse a used bookstore. It’s a couple of miles away and I have never left without a stack of books. Half-Price Books opened at the end of a little strip mall ten years ago when I first left a full-time job and it became my bit of escapism.
My daughter and I spent many hours wandering about the bookstore, always making discoveries. She’d find the latest in a series she was reading and I’d discover a collection of stories from a favorite writer. It was the thrill of the hunt, the surprise discoveries on a random table that made it a pleasure. The more jumbled a bookstore, the happier I am.
Yesterday, I stood in front of an empty storefront, a realtor’s sign taped up haphazardly. I could not explain the feeling of sadness that came over me. A sense of loss. My daughter grew up with this store, toddling about the picture and activity books until her teenage slump into the young adult novel section. I’d grown up here too, moving from parenting advice books to gardening tomes to the last few years of writing books.
Enough has been written about the demise of brick-and-mortar stores and the death of bookstores. For me, this feels personal. I was thinking about the fact that if I ever made any decent money, I’d open a used bookstore in my area. Bookstores tell me about the culture of a community. My community just opened a shooting range, Dunkin’ Donuts and has five drugstores within a 5 mile radius. I’m a stranger in a strange land.
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It’s raining this morning again. The windows are open and Mr. Cardinal is making a racket from the fence, letting all know far and wide that this patch is his. My husband and daughter are asleep. The cats have resumed napping after breakfast and the coffee is still fresh. A moment of gratitude to start the day. And then back to writing.
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You make blogging a genuine pleasure!
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