Happy Christmas Eve, everyone! I am enjoying the day off by eating a champion’s breakfast and perusing my list of blog topics saved during the Great Blog Hiatus. To begin, a tweet from November 25: Spoiler alert: the next tweet in the thread begins with the words “total bullshit.” When I read this tweet a
Well, I’m back. Once a year the religious community I belong to gets together for an annual meeting, in which business is accomplished, Eucharists are celebrated, songs are sung, and wine corks are popped. This year we were at the Sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet retreat center in St. Louis. The century-plus-old monastery is right
So! As predicted, I have received two notes from friends saying they got their paperback copy of Ryswyck in one day — one text even came with a picture — and my author copies have yet to even ship. So if you were hanging fire about ordering your paperback, let the fire land by all
Further to my last, I heard back from the SET Game customer service. It turns out they have decided to remove QRE from the dictionary of valid words altogether. So the change is not arbitrary, and I’m not crazy thinking it’s not really a word. Meanwhile, I have given up recreational complaining for Lent. It’s
It’s part of my morning routine to play the daily puzzles on the Set Game website, and naturally the Quiddler puzzle is my favorite. (Though the new Karma one is growing on me.) The goal is to use every one of the cards laid out in the puzzle to make words of at least two
38,000 — words written on “Household Lights” 4 — sequences left to write on my list enough to stuff a cushion — number of tissues applied to my massive sinus infection 5 — approximate number of Very Important pieces of mail I need to unearth for adult things like getting my car tags done 0
It’s one of those “writing is haaarrrrd” days. So I’ll blog a little. The Interstitial Novella, which is approaching 20k words and probably has about 20k more to go, has reached the plow point — the point where the run-up momentum has spent itself and you now have to work out the work: the mass
Once, watching a friend create a delicious meal in her kitchen, I observed a distinction that I had often had in mind about creative endeavors: that there is a difference between a person’s art and their craft. Craft, as I feign it, is a thing you can learn, become enthusiastic about, even take to a