Hi! Tuesday is Publication Day in Book World. It’s the most exciting day for an author: new books are released by their publishers, we get to read them, and all are happy. Because I know many of you like to read as much as I do, I want to share with you a lineup of some new titles available to us today. Fiction And Now She’s Gone, by Rachel Howzell Hall The Book of Two Ways: A Novel, by Jodi Picoult Daughters of the Wild: A Novel, by Natalka Burian To Tell You the Truth: A Novel, by Gilly MacMillan Nonfiction We’re Better than This: My Fight for the Future of Our Democracy, by Elijah Cummings Poetry She’s Strong, but She’s Tired (What She Felt #3) by r.h. Sin Young Adult Far from Normal, by Becky Wallace How it All Blew Up: A Novel, by Arvin Ahmadi White Fox, by Sara Faring Happy reading…
I’m sitting at a desk littered with paperwork. I see two planners here (why two?! We’re in a pandemic. WHAT AM I POSSIBLY PLANNING), plus an old grocery list and a messy meal-planning list I’d scratched out on the back of yet another grocery list. There’s the disclosure statement for my mother’s property, the paperwork for her car, photos of my kids and business cards I pulled out of the last purse she used before she became homebound. In the middle of the mess, at my right elbow as I type this, is forty-eight pages of the manuscript I was working on before the summer hit. I loved this story–when I sat down to write it’d fly from my fingers, and now it’s been so long since I stepped away from it I worry I’ve lost the thread. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a story idea being a real thing that tries to find its teller: if one person doesn’t pluck the story out of the air and set it to paper, someone else will. That…
The kids have told me that my half-jokey-but-really-I-was-seriousness declaration of “Onward, with joy!” as our family motto is basically the un-coolest thing I have ever done in their entire lifetimes, so just imagine their (implied) glee when our friend David texted me the Latin translation of the phrase, and I thereafter made it a habit to walk around the house shouting, “Puram, et gaudium!” with such abandon at the people who live here you’d think I was trying to gain late access to Hogwarts. I am the coolest. My children have grown over this past year, as children do. Saoirse is now twelve (and a half, she’d want me to add), Quinlan turned ten in the middle of lockdown, and Cian is seven. In approximately three seconds they’ll all be off to college and I’m going to handle it just fine, I swear. But because we have two pre-teens in the house and a little brother who is heavily influenced by said preteens, David and I have rules they beg us to follow now. You already know about the PURAM…
