Hi Folks,
I think I'm over my re-entry blues and managing to get stuck-in to 2009. Yesterday, we took our daughter sledding on Mount Royal,the Beaver Lake Hill, and enjoyed a brisk crystalline walk with our Berner Monty-Booh after a few thrilling, chilling runs down the hill en famille, squeezed onto the same ole boogy board we just used to ride the waves in Delray Beach last week. I'd been horizontal on my couch refusing to brave the cold and had be literally dragged outside by Rosy,who was her usual feisty, gung-ho self...but it was well worth it.
Ye Old Winter Sports and all that. (These northerners have something there.) With glowing eyes and wind-burned cheeks and the wonderful physical tiredness that January exertion brings, I enjoyed my cozy evening fire and hot sweet tea and enveloping book all the more.
I'm warming up the material on my next work-in-progress, my third novel and fourth book, tentatively titled, All But Forgotten, reading over the 100 pages or so that I've written, imagining into the characters and stories. It feels wonderful to be creating new work. I feel most myself when writing and am out of sorts when I'm away from it for too long. How good to be back.
Taking time out as well to explore an edgy new short story writer whom I'm reviewing. Stories about loss but written with great verve and humour. That's all I'll say for now. Wait for the review.
Speaking of reviews, when you have a moment, check out the perceptive, connected piece on The White Space Between on the blog Buzzing Blue and the reader reviews on Amazon.com, that's right .com
Apparently, more in-depth articles and reviews of the novel are in the works and reader responses have been so fulfilling. Thank you for those.
Now, back to that blazing fire, that cup of hot, sweet, milky tea, that novel....
-Ami
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Yup, the only way to survive winter is to go and play around in it. Let your body adapt to the cold and pretty soon, minus 10 or 15C will feel warm. Well, maybe not warm, but at least bearable. And the benefit is, that fire at the end of the day feels just so much better. You feel you've earned the respite and not even wild horses will drag you away from that flickering warmth.
I wish I had the time to settle down and do some more writing but, the busy re-entry schedule has intervened and there is not much time left. Have been ploughing through Dickens 'Bleak House', which is a whopper of a book at almost a thousand pages, and read a couple of short stories, one by Donald Antrim called 'A Manhattan State of mind' and another by Diane Williams, called 'My First Real Home', both of which were a welcome break from Dickens' convoluted plot line and - dare I say it - overwriting. I'll probably get hashed for that comment, but oh well, so be it. There is a method to his madness, as with every writer and after almost five hundred pages, I think I'm getting a clue.
I think I will go out and buy Milhauser's book today, as well as Bolano's, and add them to my pile of 'need to reads' that I will probably not get to until the late Spring. In the meantime, back to Esther Summerson and Jarndyce & Jarndyce.
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