I am heading to a fabulous undreamed of Caribbean beach vacation on Saturday with a hideous 140 page manuscript tucked in the bottom of my bag. Plan: yoga, beach, good conversation, etc., and pull two chapters out of this mass of strange interesting first draft words so that I can send out a little proposal for my middle grade novel in February. It is okay with me if that doesn’t happen on this vacation. I want this to be a joyful process. But I am bringing the pages so that there will be that opportunity if I am up early in our little tent cottage listening to the birds sing or the rain pitter pat, to face the small difficult beast I created in November. We shall see. Happy January, friends.
Why are campus satires so funny? Because anyone who has spent time in a college town can picture these characters down to the ground. Smiley’s sharp writing shifts pov all over campus; a sensitive and hardworking research hog, a local farmer who has plans to revolutionize farming if he can just get past the secretary that runs the campus, a black first-year from Chicago stranded in the dorms at Moo U., a creative writing professor on the verge of tenure, his profoundly untalented student Gary, the econ professor who with a perfectly clear conscience recommends destroying the last virgin cloud forest, etc. etc. The episodic nature of these self absorbed folks comes to a satisfyingly tongue in cheek conclusion in the the spring semester, when all the storylines intersect. This book comes up often on lists of great comic novels and with good reason.
Happiness is cold pizza, hot coffee with cream, and 1000 words written before work.
November for me has been a bitter cold slog of a month- too early to prepare for Christmas, too unpleasant outside for hanging around in graveyards and at the ocean. (Also, my dear mother passed away on 11/4/98 and this time of year inevitably reminds me of that.)
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